


French Exit at an American Wedding

by GoneGirl



Category: The Killing
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-12
Updated: 2016-02-19
Packaged: 2018-04-20 10:18:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 27,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4783718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoneGirl/pseuds/GoneGirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>He does all the things she normally doesn’t let people do. Touch her. Get in her space. Ask her questions. Tease her. He doesn’t know it’s not allowed, any of it. Maybe that's what gives her permission to enjoy it.</em>
</p>
<p>Linden and Holder. At a wedding. In 2006. It could have happened, guys.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Country Mouse, City Mouse

**Author's Note:**

> This started as little side project and grew some serious legs. I didn't think a fluffy "what if" scenario could turn into such a saga, but here we are.
> 
> I am lucky enough to have TWO fabulous betas. Thank you to the lovely clementinemarch for telling me the idea wasn't stupid and for the invaluable cheerleading along the way. And my endless thanks to stayseated for keeping my characterizations on point and my sanity intact and my grammar tight. You guys are just the best.
> 
> Any mistakes or weirdness left are mine and mine alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've never been inside the WAC. If you have, please suspend reality and go with it :)

When Sarah was at the academy, she kicked Charlie Haines into a wall. It wasn’t the most conventional way to make a friend, but she’s never been much for convention.

She barely knew him at the time, or any of the other fifteen guys in their intake class. The only thing they had in common was that making it through the 19-week program was going to take a miracle; they both had real-life commitments stretching them to the limit at every turn. She had a two-year-old and a failing relationship. Charlie had an alcoholic mom with severe depression. They were just two hard-ass kids trying desperately to make something better for themselves.

The instructor had paired them up on the first day of physical training. All the other guys had looked at Charlie like his dog just died, because they’d all been waiting for weeks to beat the shit out of each other, just dying to prove who had the biggest dick, and none of them wanted to have to dial it back because they got stuck with the only girl in the class.

Sarah and Charlie squared off over a blue mat, and she waited patiently for him to stop sulking and get set up. When he finally crouched down with the body pad held out, his center of gravity was way too high. He was only half-braced. The look on his face said, _let’s just get this over with._

So she set her jaw and executed a perfect offensive kick high up on the pad, aiming right for the center of his chest. He flew backwards and slammed into the wall, creating a Charlie-shaped dent that later became known as the Drywall Snow Angel.

When the dust settled, she expected Charlie to be pissed, but he couldn’t stop laughing. He bought her a beer and christened her “The Terminator” and somehow, that was that.

The nickname didn’t stick after graduation, but Charlie did. Country Mouse and City Mouse, he calls them now, because he transferred out to County and she stayed with Seattle PD. She sees him less and less now, with a brand new detective’s shield on her belt and Jack being an eight-year-old vortex that absorbs all her energy, but Charlie still stops by her office when he’s downtown for prisoner transport. They catch up in 20-minute increments every month or so, smoking outside the loading bay.

“So, I met someone,” he tells her one day, looking strangely shy. It’s an unusual start to what typically passes for Charlie talking about girls, which is more along the lines of, _oh man, this girl I banged last week..._

“Charlie Haines,” she teases him. “No way."

He shrugs and scratches his head. “Yeah. She’s amazing. I’ll probably fuck it up.”

Even though his track record says he will, she assures him he won’t, because by the way he’s not telling her much, she thinks this one’s different. And she’s not wrong about that, as she discovers over the next few months. It’s Melissa, Melissa, Melissa. She’s a lawyer. She has a little dog named Tucker. She’s got season tickets to the Seahawks. Her dad is Bill Gates’ CFO. She’s real sweet to his mom. On and on and on and on.

Sarah doesn’t even get to meet Melissa before Charlie goes all in and pops the question. And a few months later, he shows up in her office to press a fat wedding invitation into her hand, grinning from ear to ear.

“Jesus. Already? Did you knock her up?” she asks.

“Fuck, Linden. No.”

“Oh, like that’s so farfetched?” she mutters, opening the thick envelope and peering at the date. “June, huh? That’s coming up quick.”

“Look, I know you hate weddings,” he says before she’s had a chance to come up with a precursor to an excuse she’ll use later. “But I really want you to be there.”

Sarah purses her lips and stares at the fancy paper and the embossed scrollwork and pictures everything that goes along with an invitation like this. The fuss, the small talk, having to wear her one dress and one pair of heels and suffer through the overwhelming unfamiliarity of things that mean nothing to her — families and soulmates and traditions.

“Come on,” Charlie chides. “I’m barely inviting anyone. Mostly cops from my side.”

She looks up at him, leaning her head back against her desk chair. “That’s not a selling point. And I might have to work,” she says, hedging.

“Shit, are you for real?” he laughs. “Just show up, would you?” He stands up and readjusts his belt, heading back into the hall. “And don’t wear a sweater.”  

“You want me to kick you through a wall again?” she calls after him.

Sarah spins in her chair and slides the invitation out of the envelope. She doesn’t understand why people want stuff like this. She never did. It had driven Greg crazy that she didn’t want to get married. She finally agreed to a civil ceremony at city hall, but only after Jack was born. Thinking back on it now, she should have known it was doomed from the start.

But even people like Charlie, committed bachelor, want stuff like this eventually — to build a whole life with someone. The chance to do it better than the people who’d raised him. And he’d been a good friend to her over the years, sometimes the only friend she had. He was the one who convinced her to keep going when she wanted to quit the academy because Greg was about to leave her and Jack. He was the one who showed up for her after, when the combination of shift work and life as a single mom was grinding her down to dust.

She props the ridiculous invitation up on her desk. She wouldn't do it for anyone else, but she'll do it for Charlie Haines.

*** * * * ***

By the time Sarah pulls up in front of the Washington Athletic Club on Charlie’s wedding day, she needs a smoke and a drink, but she doesn’t have time for either. She’s two minutes away from being late, thanks mostly to Jack.

He was supposed to be packed up to stay overnight at Regi’s before Sarah got home from work, but he wasn’t, so she had to do it for him instead of getting changed. She thought maybe she could change in the car on the way to drop Jack off at the marina, but traffic didn’t stop long enough. So she’d shimmied into her impractical outfit in Regi’s tiny bathroom. Into her one dress, rescued from the back of her closet after years of exile, and her one pair of heels she still has kicking around for when she has to wear her one dress. No time for makeup, even if she was so inclined. Enough time to brush her hair and put it back in the same ponytail she’d been wearing all day.

“Mom,” Jack had whined as she was digging through Regi’s infinite stash of cards for every occasion, panicking because somehow there wasn’t a single wedding card.

“Jack, what honey? I gotta go.”

“I forgot my comics at home. Can we go back?”

What she wanted to do was scream _maybe if you’d packed your stuff like I told you to, you’d have your fucking comics,_ but what she actually did was take a deep breath and say, nicely, she thought, “No chance, buddy. I’m late as it is.”

The meltdown was predictable but more infuriating than normal because he’d already been on her last nerve all afternoon. Regi intervened and kicked her out the door before she could devolve further into a bad parent, and she’d tried to bring herself down from her rage-high while inching through gridlock all across town, arriving with just a few minutes to spare.

Before she gets out of the car, she takes a calming breath and yanks the neckline of the dress up. It’s lower than she remembers, but it’s not horrible otherwise. Simple, navy, made out of some kind of stretchy fabric that’s comfortable even though it’s way tighter than anything else she owns. No less than three people, in addition to Charlie, had told her not to show up in jeans and a sweater. As if she were really that clueless.

To his credit, the valet doesn’t bat an eye when she hands over the keys to her beat-up Tercel, but he’s probably already seen a string of shitty cars purchased on cop salaries.

She blinks as she pushes through the oak doors and steps into the marble and leather lobby, her eyes adjusting to the cool darkness after the bright heat outside. The WAC is a Seattle institution, not that she’s spent any time inside it. It’s as foreign to her as the moon, with its membership fees that cost more than what she makes in a year. The staff in the lobby smile politely and direct her up the stairs. They won’t be smiling in a few hours. Off-duty cops and an open bar is never a good combination.

There’s a huge landing at the top of the stairs that thins into a long hallway on either side. Charlie and his two groomsmen are lingering outside a room at the far end of the hall. As she gets closer, she barely recognizes her old friend. He looks like he’s trying to jack himself up to go into a fight — shifting on his feet, cracking his knuckles, rolling his shoulders. He’s almost as pale as his starched white shirt. He tries to smile when he sees her, but it’s more like a grimace.

Sarah stops in front of him and squeezes his arm. “Hey. Look,” she says, in the tone she uses to reason with Jack. “There’s nothing complicated about this. Stand at the front, say your lines, make Melissa the happiest girl in the world. And then meet me at the bar. Easy.”

Like she knows what she’s talking about. But he seems to buy it. “Yeah,” he says quietly, half-smiling. “The bar sounds good.”

She sends one more reassuring smile over her shoulder as she heads through the doors, so she doesn’t notice there’s someone in her way until she collides with a warm, solid mass.

Running into someone like that, physically, wouldn’t normally knock her off-balance — but then she’s not normally in these shoes. Sarah’s arms fly up to steady herself and she stumbles backwards, saved from falling on her ass by two big hands on her arms.

The first thing she notices is his tie. Even if her nose wasn’t two inches from it, it’d be hard to miss. Swirls of yellow and brown and white, possibly abstract flowers but also possibly oversized camo, edged in by thin checkerboard stripes. Offensively bad, but it gets worse, because it’s resting on a pale yellow shirt, which is under a dark brown suit jacket.

She looks up — way up — to see what kind of person wears a getup like that to a wedding at the WAC. A kid, she thinks, although he’s probably not that much younger than her — 24, 25 maybe. Awkwardly lanky. Slicked hair, gelled to within an inch of its life. Baby face toughed up with a scruffy goatee. Hazel eyes. Smartass expression.

“Hey,” he smiles, letting her go and stepping back a bit. His tone is so casual and familiar that she panics for a second, casting around to remember when and where they’ve met before.

“Hey — hi — sorry,” she sputters, flustered. He doesn’t move to let her by, so she steps around him. “Sorry,” she adds again.

“Nah, it's all good," he says in a sleepy drawl. "My bad."

She peeks back quickly as she rounds the corner into the main part of the room, a wave of nostalgia and deja vu washing over her. He’s not familiar because they’ve met before, she realizes; he’s familiar because he's the manifestation of every guy she knew in high school. The street-smart punks caught up in the system, the blue-collar kids from rough neighborhoods. An overgrown teenager trying to put off adulthood as long as possible.

She takes an empty seat in the far back corner. He settles in across the aisle from her, exchanging an elaborate handshake with the guy beside him and drawing baffled stares from some of Seattle’s elite. She’s aware that she’s staring, but it’s like a car crash — the suit, the overblown swagger, the entire bottle of drugstore gel in his hair. It’s like staring at 1996.

No, she’s definitely never met him before. Someone like that, she’d remember.

 

 


	2. When Holder Met Linden

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Do you like cringing?

Charlie maintains his ghost-like pallor until Melissa makes it all the way down the aisle with her dad. Then the color comes back in a rush, transforming his features into a bright mask of wonder, like he’s seeing his reflection for the first time. Sarah’s never seen anything like it. She’s positive she’s never looked at anyone that way.

With a full view of the room from her nosebleed seat, she gets a sense of the crowd. Charlie wasn’t kidding about it being mostly cops from his side. There are a few guys from their academy class scattered throughout the rows in front of her, along with a handful of SPD patrol officers and a group of County cowboys. Mostly decent guys. Frank Adams, she could do without. He went to County at the same time as Charlie, but when he was still with SPD, he used to show up uninvited on her patrol calls, claiming he was providing extra backup. It was a well-known dick move pulled by Old Boys who didn’t think she could back her partner up properly because she was a woman.

The vision in yellow and brown, Mr. 1996, is sitting with Adams and the rest of the group from County. His tall frame is stretched out in his seat like he’s at home watching a football game. In her peripheral vision, she can see him casting glances her way from across the aisle, trying to catch her eye. Sarah can already tell she’s going to have to shoot him down at some point. Maybe he’ll ask Adams about her. That would take care of it. Guaranteed he’d give him an earful — mostly bullshit, but for once that would work in her favor.

She goes back to watching Charlie and Melissa, listening to the reverence in his voice as he says his vows and feeling even more like she’s missing something. This is one of the reasons she hates weddings. She doesn’t get it. She’s too pragmatic to believe in something as unlikely as a soulmate, especially after everything that happened with Greg.

It has been a while, though. Maybe she can find a soulmate for the night. If she can ever shake Mr. 1996.

When everyone stands at the end of the ceremony, clapping as Charlie and Melissa are introduced as husband and wife, her not-so-secret admirer doesn’t even try to hide the way he’s staring at her. Brad Hall and Zack Pressler from her academy class are in the row in front of her, and even Pressler notices. He turns to her with his eyebrows way up, a smirk on his face.

“I’m having flashbacks,” he says, his voice almost drowned out by the music and the clapping. “It’s like we’re back at that crappy bar down the road from campus. You still got that spark, Linden. Like shady moths to a beautiful flame.”

She laughs, remembering that bar. On the rare night she’d join a few of the guys for a beer after class, all the local lowlifes would come sniffing around. The guys all thought it was hilarious. They’d take bets on how many times it would happen. Pressler would pretend to be her boyfriend sometimes just to make it stop.

“Six years later, still the story of my life,” she says, shrugging.

Pressler laughs. “And I’m no good to you anymore.” He waves his left hand in the air. A wedding ring glints at her. Sarah’s mouth drops open.

“You too?” she asks, failing to hide her surprise.

Brad Hall leans over to pretend-leer at her. “I’m still available, Sarah,” he says.

“I’m not looking,” she replies, peeking quickly across the aisle. “Please tell everyone you meet that I’m not looking.”

They follow the rest of the guests out of the room, and she grills Pressler about getting married. Of all the guys in their class, he was probably the last one she expected to settle down. Him and Charlie were complete animals.

“Can we take this outside?” she suggests after a few minutes. “I need a smoke.”

Pressler leans his head back, looking defeated. “I quit smoking,” he says sadly. Sarah turns to Hall, and he shrugs.

“Me too,” he admits. She looks between them, shaking her head.

“I don’t know who you are anymore,” she mutters, digging around in her purse for her crumpled pack of cigarettes. “Getting married, quitting smoking...”

“Yeah, yeah,” Hall says, opening his jacket and pointing to a flask nestled in his inside pocket. “We still drink, so don’t worry.”

The WAC is not smoker-friendly, she learns, as she’s directed outside, down the sidewalk and to a small patio-type enclosure in the alley around the corner of the building. Her irritation grows as she walks towards it and imagines making the trek several more times throughout the night in her heels. There are a few people gathered there, none she recognizes, and she wanders into the far corner, perching on the low metal railing to let some of the pressure off her feet.

It’s only a minute later that she sees him coming, oversized jacket and horrible tie flapping in the breeze, and she sighs, getting ready for the inevitable. At least he’s alone. Shutting him down is one thing, doing it with an audience is another.

“Hey, again,” he says, sauntering over. He’s standing a few feet away from her, cupping his hands around his cigarette to light it. She smokes faster.

“Sorry about earlier,” he continues, when she stays silent. “Didn’t see you coming.”

She smiles politely, then glances away from him, cursing Pressler and Hall even more for not smoking. “It’s fine.”

He sticks his hand out. “Stephen Holder.” Then he leans in a bit and adds, in a low voice, “Undercover officer.”

She clamps her lips down on her cigarette to keep from saying something extremely rude. He can’t be serious. His hand is still hovering between them, so she reaches out reluctantly, letting him shake it. “Sarah,” she offers, going for the bare minimum.

“You a friend of Melissa’s?” he asks. Sarah looks harder at this apparent UC. There is no way this guy’s a cop. Maybe Adams put him up to this.

“No. Are you undercover right now?” she asks innocently, eyes wide like she’s really interested. He completely misses the sarcasm.

“Nah. And if I was, I couldn’t tell you.” And he actually winks at her.

She doesn’t even know what to say, so she goes with saying nothing.

“Yeah, it’s kinda crazy, you know...making busts all day, diggin’ for the intel on the cartels. Dangerous shit.”

“Wow,” she deadpans, trying to imbue one word with as much disdain as she can muster. It goes right over his head.

“Yup. What can I say. Someone’s gotta keep the streets clean, you feel me?”

“Uh huh,” she says, stamping her cigarette into the ground. She wasn’t done, but she just wants to be back inside. “Well, nice chat. Gotta go.”

He looks a bit thrown off, but he recovers quickly. “Yeah, okay,” he says. “See you inside.”

She walks with purpose, knowing she completely screwed that up. She should have just let it play out so she could put an end to it early. It’ll drag on now, in public, in full view of a bunch of people she works with. They’ll give her endless shit about it.

She needs a drink.

*** * * * ***

Back upstairs, the party’s moved down the hall to the WAC’s giant ballroom. It’s literally glowing, floor-to-ceiling white, from the chairs to the linens to the huge centerpieces to the drapes.

She wanders around small clusters of wedding guests talking and laughing. It’s a straight split between Old Money and No Money. Impeccable full-length designer gowns next to sale-rack cocktail dresses that haven’t seen the light of day in years. Well-cut tuxedos that look too expensive to touch mixing with bargain-basement suits so cheap they glint in the light of the chandeliers. But none so ill-advised as the one on Stephen Holder, Undercover Officer.

She threads her way through the crowd until she finds Pressler and Hall standing near a window with a few other guys.

“You’re back,” Hall observes. “Your new man find you, or what? Where’d you bury the body?”

“Funny,” she says. “Why isn’t the bar open yet? Give me your flask.”

Whatever he has in there is so strong she feels like she’s drinking pure alcohol. He laughs at the face she pulls and tucks it back inside his jacket.

“So, we figured out who your new boyfriend is,” he says, eyes twinkling.

“Come on,” she complains. “Would you leave it alone?”

“Did some recon,” Hall continues, ignoring her scowl. “Apparently he’s UC over at County. He told Adams and Grieg there was some hot little redhead here he had to go find. Thinks you’re one of Melissa’s friends. They didn’t even clue him in, just sent him off to get his balls handed to him.”

They laugh, and she sighs. It’s ironic that this Holder person reminds her of high school, because that’s exactly what it’s like to work in law enforcement. The rumor mill is a finely tuned machine, both on and off the clock. You get a group of cops in a room and dangle an interesting question in front of them, like, _who’s that guy in the plasma-donor suit who wants a piece of Linden_ , and you’ll have your answer in less than a minute, and more extraneous information than you could ever want.

They get bored when she won’t tell them anything good and move on to more generic conversation, like trying to guess how much everything costs, and how much money Melissa’s family has. When she sees an aged bartender setting up in the corner, she leaves them to their debate and heads over.

“Good evening, ma’am,” he says archly, and her ego throbs with a bit of disappointment that she’s a ma’am now, not a miss, even in the eyes of this fossil. He holds up a bottle of champagne.

“May I offer you a glass?”

“You may,” she smiles, trying not to sound too excited about the prospect of finally having a drink. She’s tired suddenly, run down by a full day at work and fighting with Jack and rushing to get here and now avoiding her new man-child admirer. She wants a drink and a seat and some food. Then maybe she can ninja out of here. Regi calls it a French exit — sneaking out without saying goodbye. Sarah has no idea why. But she’s mastered it.

The ancient bartender starts pouring her a glass of champagne like he’s competing for a title — placing a crystal glass _just so_ , spinning the bottle, pouring slowly so that the foam rises perfectly to the top and sparkles beautifully. As her mouth starts watering in anticipation, she feels a presence at her elbow. She knows it’s Holder by the way the bartender does a quick but subtle double-take. She sighs quietly.

She continues ignoring him as the bartender places her perfect champagne in front of her. This is what she’s going to need to get through the night. Many more glasses of champagne.

“There you are, ma’am. And for you, sir?”

Holder uses that as his cue to lean in and crowd her space. She frowns and slides her glass away from him, and he shifts to make up for it, his broad shoulder brushing hers.

He slaps the bar. "Gimme a rum and swampwater, brother."

Don’t laugh, she thinks immediately. It’s like when Jack was a little kid, and he’d throw a tantrum that was so dramatic it was funny, and she’d have to hide her face so he wouldn't see her laughing, because that would just make it worse. At least she hasn’t touched her champagne yet, because she’d either be choking on it or spitting it all over the bartender, who looks like someone just told him he has to clean the toilets. With his mouth.

She looks at Holder, and he seems totally unperturbed. He raises his eyebrows when he catches the look on her face.

"What?" he demands. "Swampwater is the _shit_." He leans closer to the shellshocked bartender, gesturing to the cans of soda lined up behind the counter. "Yo, just mix up Coke and root beer and whatever —"

"Thank you, sir. I know what... _swampwater_...is," the bartender says, like he’s saying something filthy. His staunch expression falters for a moment before he regains his composure and begins pouring small amounts of various sodas into a highball glass with the same attention he paid to her champagne. Watching him struggle with the indignity of mixing up swampwater just adds to the comedy, and she bites the inside of her cheek to keep the smile off her face.

"You ever tried swampwater?" Holder's asking her now, and she can’t help it, she’s smiling.

His face softens a bit, and he smiles back, shifting from unaffected to amused, and maybe a little confused. She twists the stem of her champagne flute.

"I think I aged out of that particular cocktail about twenty years ago," she replies. His eyes flick over her face.

"So...when you were two?"

The little bruise on her ego from being a ma’am disappears. The fact that he thinks she’s 22 warms her cold heart, even if he is just trying to get in her pants.

She smiles again, picking up her drink and turning to leave. "Nice try. Enjoy your swampwater."

 


	3. Fake It 'Til You Make It

Every wedding guest hates that dead block of time between the ceremony and the reception, but Sarah hates it more than most. In her world, there’s not much that's worse than small talk with happy, tipsy strangers, because those conversations invariably lead to innocent questions she can’t easily answer. _Where did you grow up? Is your family in Seattle? Where did you go to high school?_ If she gives up the fact that she’s an aged-out foster kid, she has to deal with the surprise and the assumptions and a whole new breed of questions, and she’ll feel everything all over again with a surprising amount of clarity. So she’s evasive and doesn’t stick with one conversation for too long, and sometimes that’s almost as awkward, but it’s easier to be brusque than it is to be honest.

And tonight, she has the added element of Holder to deal with, who somehow always seems to be somewhere in her vicinity. Lurking in her peripheral vision, casting loaded looks her way. Finding a way to brush by her on his way here or there, a swift invasion of her space that lasts just a beat too long to be accidental, but never long enough to be obvious.

“Enjoying yourself?” she asks him pointedly during one of these too-close encounters. She's somewhere between irritated and flustered. He grins down at her as he sidles past, his eyes full of mischief.

“Yup,” he says simply. And as quickly as he appeared, he’s gone again. She rolls her eyes and sips her champagne to hide the smile tugging at her mouth.

When she gets tired of bouncing from conversation to conversation, of dodging and weaving and trying to be polite about it, she sequesters herself at her table, where the conversation is safely focused on work. She’s seated with Pressler and Hall and a handful of SPD patrol officers — no wives, no girlfriends — and thanks to another glass of champagne and a few more swigs from Hall’s rapidly emptying flask, she starts to relax and actually have a good time. Not even the googly-eyed looks Holder keeps shooting her from across the room bother her.

But the booze makes her restless for another smoke, so she decides to head outside again before dinner. Whenever that might be. Apparently, the bridal party is running behind with their photos, but the sooner this crowd gets fed, the better. Every cop she’s come across, and most of Melissa’s well-heeled family and friends, are moving quickly past tipsy and headlong into shitfaced.

When she pushes through the doors into the hall, the noise of the reception fades, and she can hear her phone ringing in her purse. She sighs, her heart sinking as she imagines getting called in to work with two drinks under her belt and a cocktail dress hugging her body, but when she fishes it out, she sees Regi’s number on the display.

Jack starts chattering at her as soon as she answers. "Mom. Regi said we can go out on the boat tomorrow morning if you say it’s okay. Can I? Please? Pleeeease can I?"

“Well…” She pretends to think about it, just to make him squirm. “Only if you don’t have any soda tonight. And if you don't stay up too late. And if you help Regi clean up after dinner. And Jack, you have to listen to every word she says when you’re out on the water.”

The ballroom doors swing open behind her, startling her. Holder swaggers into the hall, trailed by a few of the County crew. By the way they’re smirking and glancing between her and Holder, who’s studiously ignoring her with an odd look on his face, she guesses they must have finally clued him in about the fact that she’s a cop.

“Mom? Hey, Mom?” Jack is saying.

“Yeah, what Jack?”

“I already had one soda.”

She smiles. “That’s okay. Just no more tonight, alright? And yes, you can go.”

“Yes! She said yes!” he yells at Regi, but right into the receiver. She winces and holds the phone out a bit.

“Have fun tonight. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, okay? I love you. And remember the rules, Jack,” she says, watching the County boys make their way towards the stairs, probably heading out to smoke. At the top of the stairs, Holder turns and looks at her, eyebrows raised. He hangs back a bit and points downstairs, asking if she’s going out, too. She half-raises her hand, intending to wave him on, but she’s distracted by Jack still talking.

“...and then we’re gonna order pizza and watch a movie. Bye, Mom.” And he hangs up before she can say anything else.

She blinks in surprise. “Bye,” she says to no one.

Holder is still waiting at the top of the stairs, but the rest of the group is gone. Sarah walks over slowly and stops a few feet in front of him. He’s watching her cautiously, like he’s not sure what she’s going to do.

“So,” he says, rubbing the scruff on his chin with his hand. He leans back on the banister at the top of the stairs. “Funny story I just heard.”

“Yeah?” she asks, thinking that could mean any number of things. “What’s that?”

“I heard...you’re a detective. Seattle PD.”

Sarah puts her phone back into her purse and raises her eyebrows. “And that’s funny why?”

“Not _ha-ha_ funny,” he clarifies. “Funny as in, why didn’t you tell me before, when I was making a damn fool of myself trying to impress you?”

He looks genuinely contrite, or at least she thinks that’s him looking contrite. It’s hard to tell. She lets his question hang in the air for a minute, trying to come up with an answer. She can’t let him totally get away with how obnoxious he was. It’s her civic duty to take him down a notch or two, for females everywhere.

“Hmm. Which time?” she asks finally, letting a small smile through.

He laughs and drops his chin to look at his shoes. “That bad, huh?”

Sarah shrugs, shifting her weight on her feet. “You should reconsider your opening line," she offers. "And maybe next time you try to impress a girl, let her talk a bit. Maybe ask a question. Just a thought.”

“I did,” he insists. “The time at the bar. I asked if you like swampwater.”

She rolls her eyes. “Something other than that.”

He chuckles, crossing one foot over the other like he’s settling in for a long conversation. “Shoot. These lady-killer eyes ain’t enough to seal the deal?”

He does actually have nice eyes, but she only just notices when he mentions it. Probably because he’s like the Fourth of July with all his other distracting characteristics.

“Not for me,” she says. She can see the retort on the tip of his tongue right away — _what’s enough for you?_ — so she keeps talking to head him off. “Who told you I’m a detective?”

He pauses before he answers. “Adams. Said you guys came up together.”

Fucking Adams. Of course he did, and he probably performed his black-belt-level bullshit routine, too. She knows it well, having been on the receiving end more than a few times. He’s frighteningly good at making hints and insinuations seem like actual fact.

“What else did he say?” she asks carefully. She can’t help it. She wants to know what assholes like Adams are saying about her these days. Probably implying she slept her way to her detective’s shield.

His eyes slide away from hers for a second, and that tells her everything she needs to know. Some things never change.

But what he says is, “Nothing worth repeating.”  

That’s not what she expected. She stands up just a bit straighter.

“Yeah, I don’t know if you know,” Holder continues, “but he kinda has a complex when it comes to female cops. Think it’s cuz he has a small dick. I’ve been in the showers with the guy...it’s real bad.”

Sarah opens her mouth to say something, anything, she doesn’t even know what, and all that comes out is a breathy laugh of surprise. Whether he’s bullshitting her or not, she can’t stop the smile creeping over her face. The idea that Adams has a tiny dick is just too good. It would explain so much.

Holder grins in return, pushing off the banister and leaning in like he’s about to tell her a secret.

“And he’s got me to compare himself to, and that ain’t easy for anyone.”

Her smile turns stiff. Jesus Christ, this guy.

She’s saved from attempting a response to that by a young kitchen staffer carrying an empty chafing dish. He slams to a halt just as he passes them, openly staring at Holder.

"Holy shit,” he says. “Stephen Holder?"

Holder looks over and grins in sudden recognition. “Oh, damn! Ramon, you motherfucker. It's been ages, yo. You work here?”

There’s a complicated handshake exchanged, made more complicated by the fact that Ramon has to tuck the chafing dish under his arm to do it. Sarah starts sidestepping towards the stairs while they're occupied, but Holder reaches out and brushes her arm with his hand. His touch isn't strong enough to hold her in place, but it does surprise her into stopping.

She stares down at his fingers resting on her skin. She doesn’t like being touched, generally; anyone who’s spent any amount of time with her knows that. She’s about to pull her arm away when his fingers shift just a bit in a caress so small she's not even sure she felt it. Then he lets go, and when she looks up at his face, it's missing some of the usual swagger. It's curious, relaxed. Reflecting some of the surprise she's sure is in her own.

Before she can think any more about it, he turns his attention back to Ramon. “Ramon, help a brother out, would you? My girl Sarah here has these sexy-ass shoes on, and we ain’t into walking out to Timbuktu every time we wanna smoke, you know? Anywhere else we can go?”

She does want a cigarette, and it would be nice not to have to walk a mile to get it, but she still raises her eyebrows at Holder’s assumption that she’ll go anywhere with him. She thought his overblown confidence was an act, a cheesy, juvenile attempt at charm, but she’s beginning to wonder. Maybe this is just how he lives life on a regular basis, acting like he’s going to get what he wants, all the time. A constant game of fake it ’til you make it.

Ramon glances around to see if anyone else is within earshot before he leans in a bit. "There's a room on this level," he says, his voice low. "Go past the bathrooms, at the end of the hall. It has a balcony you can get at from one of the windows. The banquet staff use it sometimes. But hey, if you get busted, you didn't hear it from me, homie. I like this job.”

He starts walking away, swinging the chafing dish onto his shoulder, but he stops and turns around again after a few steps. “Hey,” he says. He’s grinning, looking between the two of them like he’s just figured something out. “It ain't exactly _private_ private, you know, so..."

Sarah starts to tell Ramon it is definitely not like that, but Holder cuts off her protests. “Yeah, don’t worry about it,” he calls. “We’ll keep it PG. Maybe PG-13.”

“Holder,” she hisses. He just laughs.

"Come on, Detective. Let me have my moment."

He’s already moving down the hall towards the washrooms. He pauses when he notices she’s not following.

"You coming, or what?"

She hesitates. She’s still not sure about this guy. Mr. 1996. Mr. Swampwater. Mr. My-Dick-Is-Huge.

“You just wanna go outside?” he asks, forcing her to decide. “That’s cool, we can — ”

“No,” she says quickly, her need for quick a cigarette outweighing her uncertainty of Holder. At the very least, he’s entertaining. “Let’s just…” she waves her hand towards the washrooms.

“You nervous, Linden?” he asks as she draws up beside him. “You and me, sneaking around, hanging out in our own private smoking section?”

She pins him with a look. “Why would I be nervous? You planning on trying something stupid?”

“Nah. Think I’ve done enough of that for one night.”

That’s true, she thinks. He’s certainly thrown some cringe-worthy lines her way. Ogled her from across the room. Shadowed her like a lost puppy. He’s finally accepted she’s not into it.

She waits for the relief to hit her, that maybe he’s given up. It doesn’t come, which is strange, but what she feels in its place is much stranger — a faint but unmistakable twinge of disappointment.


	4. Smoking on Balconies with Boys

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Forgive my weak chapter titles. I decided to do it because I had, like, two that I really liked, and I figured I could come up with seven more. IT'S SO HARD THOUGH.

The room isn’t hard to find — the Crystal Room, according to the plaque outside — and it’s conveniently tucked around the corner from the washrooms, so no one watches them slip through the doors together.

It’s fairly small, with a long wall of windows curtained against the early evening sun. They start at opposite sides and lift the dark drapes to look for the balcony, Holder with much more enthusiasm than Sarah. She’s only checked two sections when he yells, "Jackpot!" from a few windows over, followed quickly by, "Oh, snap! This is dope."

Sarah walks over, watching with some amusement as the Holder-shaped mass behind the curtain struggles to get the window open. The soft crack of the seal unsticking is followed by some other random comment from him that she can’t really hear.

When she peels back the curtain, he’s already out on the balcony, which is nothing more than a small rectangular perch jutting out from the side of the building. There’s an ashtray tucked into a corner that Holder grabs and sets down on the wide cement railing.

“Did I deliver, or did I deliver?” he asks her as she steps out. Sarah casts him a sideways glance, not wanting to inflate his ego any more than needed.

“Not bad,” she admits, pulling a cigarette out. He already has his lighter ready for her. She takes a big drag and peeks down into the alley below, then left and right, noticing similar small balconies running the length of the building.

“These are probably just decorative,” she says, mostly to herself. “They don’t have doors. I bet they’re not up to code for occupancy.”

Holder tilts his head at her, blowing smoke out of the side of his mouth. “Damn. You really know how to start a conversation,” he observes.

“What?” she says, half indignant, half amused. “It’s true. Like your conversation topics are so much better?”

“I can think of better topics, yeah.”

She appraises him cautiously. “Such as?”

A slow smile creeps over his face and he raises his eyebrows like she just opened Pandora’s Box. She purses her lips around a smile and waits.

“How do you know Charlie?” he asks. Off her look of total surprise, he adds, “I’m starting you off easy.”

So she tells him the story, about meeting Charlie at the academy and kicking him into the wall. It takes forever to get through, though, because Holder spends a solid minute laughing about the fact that she kicked Charlie through two layers of drywall. Then he wants every single detail. What kick did she use? Who else was there? What room was it in? How long did it take them to patch the hole? Did she get in shit from the instructor? And his questions get her laughing, because she starts remembering little details suddenly, like how Charlie looked like an albino afterwards, because he was covered from head to toe in white dust. And how their gruff, ex-military instructor flapped around Charlie like a mother hen, convinced he was concussed.

“Fuck,” he laughs. “I can’t believe he never told me that.”

Sarah sighs, a good sigh, the kind you need after you’ve laughed really hard. It feels great. Holder’s grinning at her with a strange look on his face, like he wants to say something or ask her something, and a little warning bell starts tinkling in her brain. Then his face starts looking a little pinched, like he’s nervous for some reason. Oh, she thinks, here it comes.

“So, Sarah Linden...would you wanna get dinner sometime?”

He trips over the words, the last part of the sentence coming out in a rush. She looks at his horrible tie and arranges her face into a neutral expression.

“That’s...not really my thing,” she says. He just stares at her.

“What’s not? You don’t eat dinner?”

Sarah grits her teeth. “I eat dinner. I just don’t date.”

“Like...at all? Or just me?”

Sarah looks down at the railing of the balcony, studying the rough surface intently. It’s a straightforward question. He’s definitely not her type, that’s for sure, so it would be fair to say _just you_. But the truth is more complicated. She hasn’t dated at all in years. The few time she’s tried have been unqualified disasters. She gets by with random hookups here and there, but dating...no, she doesn’t date anymore. At all.

She tries for a minute to put something into words, and it’s strange, what comes out in the end: “I have a son. He’s eight.”

She doesn’t look up from the railing, but in her peripheral vision, she watches Holder turn his body towards her, leaning his hip on the railing. She doesn’t know what spurred on her uncharacteristic sharing. And she keeps going, which is even more bizarre. “Between that and work, it doesn’t leave time for much.”

She forces herself to look up and meet his eyes, expecting to see disappointment, the subtle retreat that she’s accustomed to when men learn she has a son. It’s why she sticks with random hookups. No investment, no commitment, no expectations.

It’s not there, though. He just seems interested.

“Yeah?” he says. “That’s cool. I like kids. Does he eat dinner? He can come too, how’s that? What’s his name?”

She laughs a bit, shaking her head. She can tell he doesn't expect an answer to any of his rapid-fire questions, but she gives him one, the easiest one. “His name is Jack.”

He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out his wallet. When he hands her a small photo, she thinks, holy shit, does this kid have a kid?

“This is my nephew, Davy. Little man’s the light of my life.”

It’s a sweet photo. In it, Holder’s crouched beside Davy in front of a door, both of them grinning out at the camera. Davy’s wearing a backpack and clutching a lunch box. He looks about three.

Her mind starts working automatically on the image in front of her, like she’s trying to piece together evidence at a scene. This was probably Davy’s first day of preschool. There’s a purse in the corner of the frame, abandoned, she imagines, by Davy’s mom so that she could take this photo. Holder’s doing the job Davy’s dad should be, so he’s probably not around anymore. The front porch they’re on is run down, in need of a paint job, but it’s clean and tidy — working class single mom trying to give her kid the best in life with what little she has.

But the most interesting thing about the photo is Holder. In jeans and a plain white t-shirt instead of his gigantic suit, his hair soft and messy instead of like molded plastic, he’s like a different person. It’s jarring.

He’s edged over to stand beside her, both of them staring down at the image. She glances up at him, trying to superimpose Photo Holder onto the one standing beside her. He smiles a little, his eyes skipping from hers back down to the picture.

The photo feels odd in her fingers suddenly, awkward, and she hands it back to him. “Cute kid,” she offers. He nods, tucking it back into his wallet.

“Yeah. So, speaking of dinner,” he says abruptly. “I’m fucking starving.”

She takes one last drag from her cigarette and raises her eyebrows at him, wondering at the change in topic but grateful nonetheless. “Me too,” she says. “We should head back.”

They stub their cigarettes in the ashtray and he goes back in first, holding the curtain aside for her so she can step through. The balcony isn’t flush with the floor in the room, and between that and her shoes and her eyes not adjusting to the dark quick enough, she almost falls right on her face.

His hand shoots out and grabs hers. It’s the second time he’s kept her upright when she should have been on her ass. And the third time he’s touched her.

“Thanks,” she mutters, staring at their still-linked hands as she straightens up. He lets the curtain fall, casting them back into darkness.

"Anytime," he says quietly.

He's so close she can feel his body heat, or maybe that's just her, because she's warm all of a sudden. It’s a strange feeling, this gentle buzz in her stomach and chest and under the light press of his hand on hers. Strange, but not totally unfamiliar. The part of her she associates with feeling like this went dormant a while ago, sitting silent and still, like the old mantle clock she has that she hasn’t wound in years. But it’s rumbling back to life now, dust flying, gears locking into place.

He traces a line over her knuckles with his thumb and the gears kick into motion. She’s almost convinced she could hear them, if her pulse wasn’t pounding so loud in her ears.

“Alright, Detective,” he says. “Let’s bounce."

He unclasps his hand from hers and she takes a deep breath, supremely thankful for the cover of darkness that hides the flush starting to build in her face.

*** * * * ***

“Where the fuck were you?” Pressler demands when she sits back down at their table.

She cringes inwardly and trains her eyes on Pressler, not letting them slide over to where she knows Holder is, a few tables away. She furrows her brows and shrugs. “Smoking. And Jack called.”

Pressler leans back in his chair. “Well, they brought some bread around. But we didn’t save you any.”

“Awesome,” she says flatly. “Thanks for that.”

Charlie and Melissa make their grand entrance a few minutes later, looking like they’re over the moon with happiness. Sarah only half-watches them, because she’s busy trying not to notice how Holder is watching her. He’s holding his stupid swampwater, and when she finally glances at him, he raises it a bit, like he’s toasting her, a cheeky grin on his face. She just shakes her head and tries not to smile.

The MC drones through introductions for a while, then announces they’ll be proceeding to the buffet in order of table number. Her entire table — Table 19 — loses its collective mind. Grown men throwing napkins and huffing and swearing like teenagers.

“You’ll live,” she assures Hall, who has his head on the table like he’s going into shock. “Look. There’s more bread coming.”

She manages to snag one piece of bread this time around, leaving the rest to the pack of starving animals she’s sitting with. Banquet staff come around with wine for the table, and she sips a glass slowly and half-listens to the conversations around her, her mind still churning over Holder. He’s impossible to categorize. Impossible to ignore. Oddly charming. Completely full of himself. She peeks at him over the rim of her wine glass, taking in his oversized suit and man-child hair and the way he slouches when he sits.

By the time their table gets called for the buffet, she’s no closer to figuring him out, but she does have a pleasant buzz going.

“Interesting,” says a familiar voice at her shoulder while she’s standing in line. Of course he’s right behind her. She turns around to see he’s staring at the plate she’s holding like he’s analyzing a crime scene photo. “Know what that looks like?”

“I assume you’re going to tell me.”

“It looks like dinner,” he continues. “Like you, eating dinner.”

"I never said I didn't eat dinner,” she says under her breath.

"Huh, that's true," he agrees. "Just not with others."

"Right. I eat alone."

She wants to add something else to make up for how spinsterish that sounds, but she can't think of anything. She faces forward again and continues down the line, adding food to her plate at random, ending up with a sparse collection of carbs and a giant slice of prime rib.

“Looks balanced,” Holder observes.

She huffs at him over her shoulder, nodding at his overflowing plate of every single buffet item. “Did you leave anything for anyone else?”

“It ain't easy being me,” he tells her as they leave the buffet and head back down the hall towards the ballroom. “Gotta feed the beast, you know what I'm saying?"

"I have no idea what you're saying," she says. "Most of the time, actually."

She waits for the cheeky reply and doesn’t get one, just a loud _psssst_ behind her. He’s stopped a few feet back, looking at her pointedly while a few other guests pass by. She raises her eyebrows at him. “What?”

“So, uh, see you later?" He inclines his head in the direction of the washrooms. Their secret smoking area. Her stomach jerks.

"Yeah," she says before she can think too hard about it. "Couple hours from now? Around 8:00?"

He smiles so big his eyes crinkle. He swaggers towards her and leans down to rumble in her ear, "It's a date."

 


	5. I'm Not Drinking Tequila

Speeches. Reason 265 why Sarah hates weddings.

It’s already 8:15 when Melissa’s dad takes the podium. He’s a powderkeg of emotions, swinging from happily nostalgic to awkwardly tearful, and Sarah casts a surreptitious, long-suffering look across the ballroom at Holder. He jerks his head towards the doors, like they should just get up and leave, but even she knows better than to disappear when the father of the bride has the floor.

She’s antsy, though, and for more than a cigarette. She’s spent the last two hours in a strange state of hyper-awareness, feeling Holder’s attention on her almost like a physical touch. Twice, she’d been busted by people at her table for “looking weird,” as Hall put it, but she can’t help it. She’s disoriented, out of sorts, distracted. All because of Mr. 1996. Who would have thought.

It’s not nerves, exactly — she doesn’t get nervous about stuff like this — it’s more a feeling of being unsettled or unbalanced. Like things aren’t under her control. He does all the things she normally doesn’t let people do. Touch her. Get in her space. Ask her questions. Tease her. Endlessly.

Her usual response to that is to step behind the carefully-constructed walls she’s erected over the years. But tonight, the champagne has her bones feeling loose and her skin blooming with warmth, and she’s inclined to let it play out. He doesn’t know it’s not allowed, any of it, so that gives her permission to enjoy it.

When Melissa’s dad wraps up, Sarah turns and quirks an eyebrow Holder. He raises his chin in a quick nod of confirmation. To the balcony.

She gets there first, waiting for her unlikely date and staring out at the dramatic sunset, a glow of reds and oranges lighting up the sky. The solitude is nice, even if it’s momentary. The constant press of so many other people is starting to fray her at the edges a little. It’s reminding her of some of the group homes from her childhood, oddly enough. She was never alone there, either.

“Nice view,” Holder’s voice rumbles in her ear. She jumps about a foot, flattening a hand over her pounding heart. His eyes flick over her, head to toe, like he’s been waiting anxiously to see her up close again.

“Jesus,” she breathes. “I didn’t even hear you.”

He leans his lanky frame against the railing and holds a cigarette out for her, cupping his hand against the breeze as she leans over for a light. “Lost in thought?” he asks.

She shrugs, nodding out at the sky. “It’s a nice sunset.”

He turns to look at it. “It is,” he agrees. “Romantic,” he adds, wiggling his eyebrows at her. She laughs as she blows smoke over her shoulder.

“Oh yeah? This one of your moves? Bring a girl onto a sketchy balcony, ply her with cigarettes as the sun sets over a back alley?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” he grins. “My moves are the stuff of legend.”

She smirks around her cigarette. “I don’t doubt that."

They smoke in silence, stealing sideways glances at one another. The quiet starts making her uncomfortable after a while, so she asks how he ended up working undercover.

He seems happy she wants to know, and he jumps right in, but without the cheesy bluster he tried when they first met. He got assigned almost right out of the academy, which is unusual, but he’s obviously the kind of person who fits in on the street. He doesn’t say it, but she thinks he probably has a rough past he’s worked through; the best UCs always do, and she gets the feeling he’s good at what he does.

The conversation drifts all over the place from there, mostly focused on work. There’s a brief battle over who’s got the best I-arrested-this-guy-one-time story (she wins), an in-depth debate about whether county or city police work is better. He wants to know how she made detective, thinks he might want to go that way one day.

At some point, there’s a scuffle between two bums in the alley below, and they both lean over to watch. It fizzles out without getting dramatic, but they stay in the same position, elbows resting on the railing, shoulders brushing together every now and then, sometimes by accident, sometimes not. Holder takes his jacket off and lays it over the railing so she won’t scrape her elbows on the rough cement surface. He’s so earnest about it that she finds herself legitimately charmed.

When she asks about his nephew is when she gets the real story about where he came from. It’s a story she’s heard a hundred times — growing up in the shadow of the poverty line, a mom who loved the pipe more than her kids, a string of users and abusers taking the place of an absentee dad. But Holder had a sister who looked out for him, and life hasn’t treated her too kindly from the sound of it, and so now he looks out for her and Davy and his niece on the way.

“And look at me now,” he ends with. “Livin’ the dream.”

He turns his head to smile at her, and his face is much closer than she expected. The play of emotions there is fascinating — first a quick look of surprise at their proximity, then interest when she doesn’t move away, then a flash of his usual cockiness that fades out into something like a cautious invitation. She finds him so easy to read that she actually has to remind herself she doesn’t know him. They just met.

That doesn’t seem to matter now, with his face floating just inches from hers, their cigarettes forgotten, fading down to ash between their fingers. The sunset has given way to the dusky blue of early evening, but even in the low light she can see the way his eyes darken as they stutter over her face, the way they focus on her mouth.

Sarah’s breath catches in her throat and she coughs reflexively. She shoves her stick of ash into the ashtray with more force than necessary. Tightens her ponytail. Mutters something about how long they’ve been outside, that they should go back in. Anything to distract herself from how her heart is racing and her skin is tingling with an undeniable ache to be touched.

And something about the crooked, half-nervous smile on his face says that she isn’t fooling anyone.

*** * * * ***

Back inside, she loses Holder in the hall — “Gotta take a leak,” he says, throwing her a salute as he ducks into the bathroom — and she’s only a few feet into the ballroom when she gets swept up in a tide of rowdy cops heading to the bar. It’s everyone from her academy class, including Charlie, and they all look like they’re excited to make some bad decisions.

Charlie throws an arm around her and gives her a squeeze, forcing her to walk with them. “I told you you’d have fun,” he says, leaning his head down conspiratorially. “Didn’t I?”

“How do you know I’m having fun?” she challenges.

“Because you look a little drunk. And you’re smiling. And I’m still hugging you, and you haven’t kicked me in the balls yet.”

The tide of cops washes up at the bar, and the bartender immediately starts lining up shot glasses in a way that indicates he’s seen this particular group a few times already.

“I’m not drinking tequila,” Sarah announces as amber liquid splashes into each glass, but no one’s listening.

“Whatever, _Mom_ ,” Charlie scoffs, passing her a shot. “Since when are you afraid of a little tequila?”

The smell hits her instantly, triggering her gag reflex, but she keeps a straight face and holds her glass up along with everyone else as they wait for Charlie to say something. He looks at them with a big smile on his face that’s a little watery, but his voice is strong and steady when he finally speaks. “Cheers. To friends who have your back.”

She holds her breath, but it makes no difference. It burns all the way down her throat. She slams her empty glass on the bar and looks up to see Holder watching her, back at his County table.  He stares at her as she wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, just long enough for twin spots of heat to light up in her cheeks that have nothing at all to do with the tequila.

*** * * * ***

Against her better judgment, another shot of tequila follows. And then another glass of champagne, and Sarah topples over the line from tipsy to drunk. It’s been so long since she’s been drunk that she’s forgotten how fantastically freeing it is. Inhibitions: gone. Emotional barricades: crumbling. Motor skills: suffering.

Interest in Stephen Holder, Undercover Officer: off the charts.

As the night winds on, they spend more and more time together, and she begins to realize they’re more similar than they are different, unlikely pair or not. He’s like no one she’s ever met, but she has the strangest feeling of familiarity when she’s around him. It’s not just nostalgia, triggered by his teenager hair and his 90s-prom suit, like she thought at first. It goes deeper than that, this unexpected, inexplicable connection. And despite how much he threw her off when they first met, despite his abrasive personality and his total disregard for all social convention — or maybe because of it, actually — she thinks she likes this guy.

His sense of humor has her constantly on guard and occasionally grouchy, but he gets more laughs out of her than anyone has in a long time. It’s “Hey, Linden” this, and “Yo, Linden” that, and then questions and stories and random observations free-flowing with no verbal filtering whatsoever. He works hard, his face lighting up every time she so much as cracks a smile, and she is smiling, a lot. Mr. 1996 has managed to unearth her long-lost sense of fun.

And there’s the fact that his cocky swagger and the way he stands too close to her and the heat in his eyes when he smiles at her have all combined to stir up something dark and elemental in her stomach. Something that has her overly aware of the fact that the last time she had sex was three full years ago. There’s that.

She’s not so drunk that she can’t fall back into her comfort zone and try to analyze it, figure it out, explain it, put it in a box. But she is drunk enough that she’s obvious about it, and he catches her squinting at him intently.

“Yo. What’s with your face?” he demands, honing in on her. They’re back on the balcony again, and she’s on her last cigarette.

“Nothing,” she says, relaxing her squint. “There’s nothing with my face.”

He looks far from convinced. He points at her, hovering his finger in front of her nose, and she swats at it lazily. “Yeah, right,” he smirks. “I can see those wheels turning, Linden. You’re thinking something. What?”

She frowns, rolling her shoulders back. “Nothing. Jesus.”

“Come on. I spend all day watching people try to bullshit me and everyone else. Ain’t no ‘nothing’ happening in there right now.”

Sarah heaves a sigh, half annoyed that he won’t let it go and half intrigued that he spotted her introspection in the first place. “It’s nothing. Just —” She shrugs aimlessly, puffing on her cigarette. “This is just...this is weird.”

He brings his cigarette up to his mouth, slowly, watching her carefully. “Weird how?”

She looks up at the sky, letting the smoke from her last drag escape through her lips in soft clouds. When she starts speaking, she talks to the stars. “I don’t know. I don't usually talk to anyone this much. It’s fucking weird for me, okay?”

She might as well have just professed her undying love for him, the way he’s looking at her when she finally meets his eyes. He places a hand gently over his heart, a huge, shit-eating grin on his face, and she bets that if he could make himself cry for effect, he probably would.

She starts laughing. “Shut up.”

*** * * * ***

The music starts heating up, and people abandon their predetermined seating arrangements to scatter to new tables with better proximity to the dancefloor and the bar. Except the cops. They all cluster together at the back of the ballroom, because those tables have the best defensive seating — clear lines of sight to all the exits and they can keep tabs on everyone in the room.

It’s that fuzzy, alcohol-drenched high point of the night, that golden hour right before everything goes to shit. Spirits are sky high, everyone is conscious, no one’s thrown a punch yet,  conversations are gaining in volume and in inappropriateness, and she’s heard, “I fucking love you, man,” more times than she can count.

Sarah has just enough presence of mind to know that things are going to go downhill, hard, in about 60 minutes. She plans to be gone by then. And it’s going to be one of Regi’s French exits. Just get up and disappear. No sloppy goodbyes. No awkward, empty promises to “do this more often.” Pretty straightforward maneuver. Except she’s not quite sure what to do about Holder.

She peeks over at him, sitting at the table next to hers. He’s talking to an SPD patrol officer she vaguely knows, tipped back on two chair legs and rolling up his shirtsleeves. She finds herself mesmerized by how his fingers work the fabric, by the slow reveal of firm forearms, by the way it shifts him closer to the Stephen Holder she saw in that photo.

His eyes flick her way briefly, and he does a double-take when he sees her staring. She wants to know if he’s as stirred up as she is, so she leans on the table, casually tilting forward on her elbows. Even from ten feet away, it gives him a great view down her dress, and he falls right into her not-so-subtle trap, his eyes roving over her.

When his eyes make it back up to her face, it’s a new look she sees there. Dark. Promising. Like he hasn’t eaten in a week, and she’s a juicy burger on a silver platter.

Hmmmm, she thinks to herself. Hmmmm.


	6. French Exit

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Special thanks to **stayseated** for next level beta efforts on this chapter and the last. You're my hero.
> 
> One of Holder’s lines was adapted from the second season of True Detective. (Which isn't in any way an endorsement for that season, which was very baffling and horrible.)

An hour later, Sarah and Holder are just about the only people left in the unofficial cop zone. Brad Hall is passed out on the table a few chairs over, so Sarah isn’t counting him as present. Everyone else has scattered to the dance floor.

“It’s late. I should go,” Sarah says for about the fourth time. And like the other three times she’s said that, she doesn’t make any attempt to actually stand up and leave.

Beside her, Holder turns and flicks a little rolled-up piece of napkin at her. He’s spent the last ten minutes methodically shredding a napkin into strips, rolling the strips into little balls, and lining them up. She should have known it would be for something like this.

She huffs and peers down her dress where the napkin ball disappeared. “Good shot,” she says grudgingly. Another one hits her on the shoulder and she narrows her eyes at him. “Quit it. How old are you?”

“Twenty-four,” he replies casually. “How old are _you?_ ”

Sarah purses her lips and shakes her head. “No.”

“No?” he laughs. “That ain’t a number, mama. Yo, are you even legal? Lemme see your ID.”

She sees the intent in his eyes the second before he makes a grab for her purse, and she’s quicker, even if she is drunk off her ass. He laughs as she yanks it out of his reach and wedges it behind her back to hide it.

She tries not to laugh as he makes another half-assed attempt to steal it. “ _Holder._ I swear to God.”

“Holder!” someone else calls. “You hasslin’ my girl?”

They both turn to see Charlie wandering in a haphazard path towards them, minus his tux jacket and bowtie and sporting a giant whiskey stain — best case scenario — on the front of his shirt.

“Damn,” Holder drawls, leaning in to talk right into her ear. “He’s gonna be one-pumpin’ his blushing bride tonight. If he’s lucky.”

“Thanks for that visual,” Sarah sighs.

“Hey, I see ’em like I call ’em,” he replies, leaning back and stretching his arm out over the back of her chair. “Wait. The other way around. Whatever the fuck...you know what I mean.”

“My two favorite people,” Charlie declares as he collapses into the chair next to Holder. Sarah flips briefly into mom-mode, pushing her glass of water towards him.

“Drink it,” she orders. He downs it in two big gulps and slams the glass on the table beside Hall’s unconscious head. Hall doesn’t even twitch.

“Look at this motherfucker,” he says, laughing. “Jesus Christ. Some things never change.”

Sarah grins, propping her head up on her hand. “Yeah. Except you,” she teases him. “Leaving your wild ways behind you. Settling down.”

“One of us had to, eventually,” he tells her, eyes shining. “Wasn’t gonna be you, right?”

Sarah stiffens up, her smile faltering.

“And hey, this guy, he’s a good guy,” Charlie rambles, clapping a hand on Holder’s shoulder. “I fucking love this guy. You could do worse, Sarah. Hell, you have done worse. Way worse.”

Unbidden, Greg’s face swims into her mind’s eye. She can see him so clearly, as cold and emotionless as the day he left her and Jack for good, standing at the foot of the stairs of their shitty townhouse with his suitcase and two giant duffel bags. _I’ll call you,_ he’d said. Like she was some random girl he’d just fucked. Not his wife. Not the mother of his child. And he did call — four years later. To tell her to sign the divorce papers because he was engaged to someone else.

Sarah blinks Greg’s face away and unfreezes herself. She lifts her head off her hand, leans back in her chair, clenches her fists in her lap, and forces herself to ride out the complex wave of surprise and hurt washing over her.

This thing with Holder has lulled her into thinking that maybe she can still connect with people. Maybe she isn’t such a lost cause. But Charlie knows all her shit, and he’s right. She's destroyed almost every significant relationship in her life. Doesn’t matter how much she doesn't want it to be that way. It is what it is.

She just didn’t expect to hear it, out loud, in this moment.  

“Ah, shit,” Charlie’s saying now. She looks up, momentarily confused. She has no idea how long they’ve been sitting there. His hand slides across the table towards her, his wedding ring glinting in the low light of the chandeliers overhead. “I’m drunk, Sarah. I’m an asshole. I don’t know what I’m saying.”

She looks back at the tablecloth in front of her and says nothing. She’s vaguely aware of Holder shifting in his seat, then a light pressure on her shoulder — the slow, back-and-forth stroke of his thumb on her skin. She takes it as a gesture of comfort, or maybe a plea for her to keep her shit together and not fly off the handle. She focuses on the movement, imagines she can feel the individual whorls of his thumbprint tracking over her skin.

Charlie’s beside her now, crouching down, trying to make her look at him. God, this is fucking horrible. It was bad enough to hear it in the first place. Now she has to listen to him try to apologize.

“I love you, okay?” he tells her. He grabs her fisted hands with both of his. “Don’t be mad.”

Sarah nods tightly and musters up a quick smile so he’ll leave. And he does, thank God, planting a sloppy kiss on her cheek and wandering away without another word. She knows he won’t remember any of this tomorrow. She will.

“So, uh,” Holder stammers, and she realizes she hasn’t heard him stay silent so long all night. “You look like you could use a drink. You wanna go to the bar? Or you can chill here, and I’ll go.”

She shakes her head, pulling her purse out from behind her back robotically. She feels rattled, over-exposed, her nerves scraped raw by something as simple as the wrong comment from the wrong person at the wrong time.

“I’m gonna head out,” she says quietly. But she still can’t quite make herself get up. It’s nice, to be tucked in beside him like this. Easy.

“Don’t go,” he pleads, his arm sliding off the chair to rest fully on her shoulders. He tightens his hold on her, briefly, like a one-armed hug. “Stay. Forget that guy. He’s a punk. You want me to go beat his ass? Say the word. I’ll do it.”

She cracks a tiny smile at that. Trust Holder to threaten to beat up the groom to make her feel better. She breathes out a huge sigh and lets her head fall back onto his arm, staring up at him. His bicep tightens reflexively.

He could kiss her. She'd let him. She actually wants him to, desperately. She wants him to pull her back from the edge, to buff the sting out of her mind until there’s nothing left except him. That smart mouth on hers. That’s what she needs. There’s nothing else in the world she needs.

But that’s not what he does.

“Come on,” he says. “Get up. We’re dancing.”

*** * * * ***

He pulls her, drags her, all the way there. He only stops to grab a half-empty bottle of wine from a table, taking a swig right from the bottle and pestering her until she does the same.

“There,” he says, like that fixed everything. “You’re here. I’m here. We’re having a good fucking time. Okay? Everything else is just dust in your eyes. Blink that shit away.”

She’s never heard it put quite that way before.

“And I hope you can dance, Linden, cuz I’m about to tear this place up.”

It’s impossible for Sarah to linger under her dark cloud once they step onto the dance floor. He’s spinning her around, grinding up behind her, doing something that approximates breakdancing, half-singing along to whatever song is playing, all limbs and elbows and attitude. She’s not even dancing, really, just moving around in the middle of his whirlwind, laughing at how ridiculous the whole thing is. It’s such a spectacle that he draws a crowd, and she thinks, well, this will feed the rumor mill for a while. And she doesn’t even care if it does.

When the DJ finally switches over to something slow, Holder winds down, standing in front of her with an expectant look on his face like, _how impressed are you right now?_ Everything in her peripheral vision fades, her whole world narrowing to Holder. His hair looks a bit roughed up. His tie is loose, knocked to the side. One arm of his shirt is still rolled up, but the other one is unrolled, flapping open at his wrist. His eyes are dark and a little bloodshot, heavy-lidded, focused on her and her alone. He has the tiniest little crumb of cake stuck to the scruff on his chin.

He is the most attractive man she has ever seen.

“See?” he says. “Tore that shit up.”

She doesn’t resist at all when he pulls her into his arms. He’s awkward about it, avoiding her eyes for some reason, falling into the familiar side-to-side shuffle she associates with first dances in high school.

She eases closer, thinking, _kiss me_ , even though that’s a terrible idea to put into action in a room still fairly full of people that one or both of them knows. She flexes her hands where they rest lightly on his chest, feeling the tense and release of the muscles there as he readjusts his grip on her hips. Nothing can compete with the firm, warm feel of a man, the thrill of being pressed into a strong male body. It’s been way too long.

“I feel like we’re at a high school dance,” she announces, sounding a little breathless even to her own ears. She’s managed to get him closer to her, but not close enough. Aside from his hands on her hips, she can just feel the lightest brush of contact between their bodies every so often. It’s frustratingly chaste.

“I can work with that,” he says, smirking down at her. “You’re the preppy girl with the tight-ass ponytail. I’m the bad boy your parents warned you about.”

Her mind stalls out briefly at the reference to her parents. “I was never preppy,” she tells him after a minute. Her voice is so low he has to bend his head a bit closer to hear her.

“What were you then?” he asks.

“I was the bad girl your sister warned you about,” she says with a sly smile. His hands clench on her hips, and he pulls her in a little tighter. She breathes a little faster.

And then whatever song they’re dancing to fades away, and the DJ is yelling something about single women, front and center. Sarah snaps back into awareness, going stiff in Holder's arms as she notices Melissa at the other side of the dance floor, waving her bouquet. Any minute now, Charlie or Pressler or one of the other assholes she knows is going to come looking for her. She freezes, staring up at Holder.

“It’s the bouquet toss,” she says, panicking. “Get me out of here.” 

*** * * * ***

“Where are we going?”

She only thinks to ask this when they’re standing out on the sidewalk in front of the WAC. She had no plan when she bailed out of the ballroom and half-ran, half-stumbled down the stairs, and from the looks of it, neither did Holder. He’s glancing up and down the street like he’s waiting for inspiration to strike.

“Let’s smoke,” he decides finally.

They head to the WAC’s official smoking area, agreeing that the balcony was superior to _this fucking ghetto-ass bullshit,_ as Holder puts it.

Sarah accepts the pre-lit cigarette he offers her and takes a huge drag. The nicotine feels amazing buzzing through her veins, mixing with the champagne. She leans her head back, letting the smoke get whisked out of her mouth by the gentle breeze floating down the alley.

“Even if it was against the building code, that balcony was the bomb,” he tells her, jabbing his cigarette into the air emphatically. “Never thought you’d come out there.”

“Why not?” she asks.

“Cuz you got a giant stick up your ass, that’s why.”

She laughs, leaning back on the low metal railing behind her. “Shut up. You’re lucky I went anywhere with you after the lines you were throwing at me down here.”

He grins, side-eyeing her. “Yeah, whatever. You loved it.”

Sarah chooses not to answer, going back to her cigarette. She never would have expected to be here with him like this, considering how things started off between them, but she’s beyond second-guessing it. It’s time to move this past the high-school-smoking-buddies stage, and she’s running through potential ways to accomplish that when he clears his throat loudly.

“So,” he says. “Jack’s dad —”

Her nicotine buzz fades abruptly. One guaranteed way _not_ to move things past the high-school-smoking-buddies stage is by talking about Greg.

“Holder,” she interrupts, sighing. “Can we not?”

“I was just gonna ask if he takes care of his boy,” he says, scuffing his foot on the pavement. “Sees him, talks to him. But I’m guessing no.”

“No,” she says brusquely. “He left. A long time ago. It doesn’t matter.” She stares intently at the wall across from her, willing him to leave it alone.

“Yeah, my dad bounced, too. I never even met the guy,” he says quietly, and her eyes flick back to meet his. He stands up straighter and smooths down his rumpled shirt, his cigarette hanging out of one side of his mouth. “But look at me,” he says, a lopsided smile on his face. “I mean, I turned out alright.”

“You did,” she murmurs, and she smiles as she realizes she’s not even being sarcastic. She reaches over and tugs on his tie. “Hey, Holder. Do you eat breakfast?”

He drops his head slowly, his eyes glued to her hand on his tie. “Yeah, ’course. It’s the most important meal of the day. I do it _right,_ even on days I gotta work. Eggs, toast, veggie hash, the works —”

“No,” she interrupts, giving his tie a yank. “I meant … do you want to go get breakfast? I’m hungry.”

“Like, now?”

She shrugs. Stamps her cigarette butt into the ground. “Yeah.”

A huge smile lights his face up. “Fuck yeah. And I know the perfect place. Their eggs are off the _chain._ Let’s go, mamacita.”

He leads the way back to the street, towards the lineup of cabs down the block. As they walk, she lets herself slip her hand into his, and he grins down at her like he just won the lottery.

*** * * * ***

In the cab, she kicks her shoes off and sighs in relief, leaning down to massage her feet. She can barely feel them, they’re so sore. Holder goes off on a tangent about Chinese foot binding and gives her shit about wearing uncomfortable shoes in the first place.

“Well, I didn’t think my work boots would go with my dress,” she scowls, biting back a yelp of pain as she tries to flex her toes. They’re practically mummified.

“Here,” he says, motioning for her feet. “Let me.”

Sarah inches away from him. “No way.”

“Linden. Are you seriously saying no to a foot rub right now?”

“Yep,” she says. “You’re not touching my feet.”

“Come on.”

“Do you have some kind of foot fetish?” she demands. He just grins at her, and in the shadows of the cab she doesn’t notice his hand snaking towards her until she feels it on her calf. She jumps, her body reacting before she can stop it.

“Just trust me on this,” he whispers, his fingers slipping down to circle her ankle. Heat slides through her stomach like hot molasses, torching any residual hesitations she may have had. He strokes the slope of her ankle bone, his eyes honing in on her mouth. “Best foot rubs in all of Seattle, right here.”

Sarah can’t think straight. She can’t remember why she was resisting. So she leans back against the door of the cab and lets him drag her feet into his lap.

Without any preamble, he presses both thumbs into the arch of her left foot. She jerks and gasps, stars of pleasure exploding behind her eyes. “Oh, _fuck,_ ” she moans. “That feels amazing.”

“Told you,” Holder mutters, but he looks a little taken aback by her response.

Foot massages have never been part of Sarah’s sexual repertoire. If she was going to go for some kind of kink, she’d choose something a little less banal. But Holder is working pure magic with his long fingers, hitting pressure points she didn’t know she had, drawing sighs and gasps and quiet little moans out of her, stoking her growing arousal with each press of a knuckle or stroke of a thumb.

He has no idea, she thinks. No idea what he’s about to be hit with. Hurricane Sarah, Category 5, three years in the making and about to hit land.

By the time the cab slows to a stop in front of the diner, she’s a firestorm of hormones, and he’s squirming in his seat and avoiding her eyes.

“That better?” he asks, his voice stilted. He hands her her shoes without looking at her, and she doesn’t miss the way he adjusts his pants, even though he tries to be subtle about it.

“Mmmmm, yeah,” she sighs. He coughs and throws open his door.

*** * * * ***

"It can’t be fucking closed," he says for about the third time. They’ve both been staring at the dark, empty diner for a while now, still drunkenly denying this wrench in their plans despite the strong evidence right in front of them. Locked doors. No lights on inside. Not a soul in sight. Plus, the big CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS sign.

“It’s closed,” she confirms dejectedly, rattling the doors for good measure. She leans forward and presses her forehead against the dark glass, tilting her head to look over at him. The whole block is dark, almost devoid of life except for the two of them and the garbage sweeper rumbling up the street. It blows a hot gust of air at them as it passes, whipping her hair into her face.

She feels like he looks. Completely miserable. She doesn’t give a shit about eating breakfast, not really. She just wanted to sit across from him for a little while longer, and talk about nothing and everything, and memorize the way he looks at her, like she’s his favorite distraction.

She doesn’t want it to be over. And she must have mumbled that out loud, because he’s nodding in agreement.

"Well," he says after a minute, a tentative smile ghosting over his face, "their eggs are good, but mine are like, next level. You wanna just ..."

He nods towards the street, his eyes darting around like he’s scared she’ll say no. Sarah lifts her head off the glass, her ears perking up and her heart pounding its way into her throat.

“Just?” she prompts.

He takes a deep breath. “Just … go back to my place.”

“Okay,” she says, a little too quickly.

***** * * * *** **

Holder never shuts up. Even now, when they’re in another cab heading to his place under the pretense of eating eggs, he’s still talking. She’s not even listening. She needs to kiss him. Badly.

She starts sliding across the seat towards him, going for sultry, but by the highly amused look on his face, she thinks she must be closer to sloppy. It doesn’t matter. She doesn’t care. And he doesn’t seem to either, once she’s pressed up against him.

“What? You want another foot rub?” he asks, his face hovering above hers.

Sarah shakes her head, gazing up at him. He’s so warm. She feels like she could live the rest of her life with his body heat wrapped around her like a blanket, letting it slowly melt her like a popsicle on a hot summer day.

When she grabs his horrible tie, she doesn’t even have to pull that hard, because he’s already leaning down to meet her.

He kisses her slowly at first, almost like he’s not sure she’s real. It’s unhurried but suggestive, lips sliding and tongues meeting every so often without picking up the pace. But both of them are too drunk and too on edge to go slow for very long, and soon he’s tilting her head and pushing her back into the seat and generally steaming her up from the inside out.

The facial hair is different. But not in a bad way, she finds. Not at all. Especially when it’s dragging along her jaw and around to the patch of sensitive skin under her ear. Every pass of that stubble pulls a rough, breathy exhale from her throat. She wants to know how far away his place is, and she should probably ask where it is, too, but his tongue is back in her mouth now and _fuck,_ it’s something else, and if this is what he can do to her fully clothed, the cab could be taking them to Canada for all she cares.

His hands are all over her. He’s mapping her body like he’s planned the route in advance and he’s been waiting all night for the light to turn green. But he’s maddeningly proper about it, keeping north of her waist and on top of her dress. Maybe he thinks she’d balk if he tried anything bolder, but she’s way too keyed up to be polite. And she lost the ability to be subtle sometime around her fourth glass of champagne, so eventually she hikes her leg over both of his and sits up to straddle him.

Holder grips her by the hips and stares at her, breathing hard. She gets a few delicious seconds of his dick pressed right up against where she wants it before the cabbie spies them in the mirror and slaps the steering wheel, apparently infuriated.

“No sex!” he yells. “No sex in car!”

Holder’s eyes flick past her to the cabbie. “Yo, we ain’t that shady, brother. Come on,” he complains. “No one’s having sex in this stank-ass car.”

His voice is deep, roughed up by alcohol and arousal, the evidence of which is very obvious. Hearing him say “sex” sends all sorts of images flying through her inebriated brain, and she settles in more firmly on his lap, drawing a quiet groan out of him. His head falls onto the headrest like he can’t take it, so she zeroes in on his pale neck with her mouth, tonguing his carotid artery.

“Almost there,” he mutters through gritted teeth as she grinds into him shamelessly. “Ease up, girl, or this’ll be over before it starts.”

They pull up in front of his place a minute later, so she reluctantly eases off her human carseat and tries to straighten out her dress while Holder counts out money. When she reaches up to tighten her ponytail she realizes it’s already half undone and hanging to the side. She has no idea how long it’s been like that. She just gives up and pulls out the tie.

They exit out opposite sides of the cab, and then they’re back in the summer night, standing three feet apart on an empty residential street somewhere in Seattle, full of liquid courage.

Holder spreads his arms right there in the middle of the road, and she marvels at his wingspan.

“Detective Linden,” he says, grinning, “welcome to my dojo.”

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter might be slightly delayed thanks to life just being a little crazy right now. I will try my very best to get it up quick!


	7. Alcohol and the Adult Male

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this is where that E rating comes in. Happy Friday! :)

Holder’s apartment is pretty much what Sarah expected. The tiny living room and kitchen are full of bachelor pad clutter — ashtrays, beer bottles, a pile of laundry on the couch, a stack of pizza boxes by the door — with a few unexpected touches, like a lineup of small green plants along a windowsill and a burbling fish tank with a single, ornately-finned occupant.

“His name is Bruce Lee,” Holder tells her.

What she didn’t expect, though, is Holder actually going through the motions of making her breakfast. She’d forgotten about that entire discussion, especially after it had taken them forever just to get through his front door. He’d been having trouble with his keys, and she’d been having trouble keeping her hands off him, and that had resulted in a lengthy, breathless hallway makeout session that only ended when an irritated neighbor poked his head out to tell them to take it the fuck inside.

Once they’d managed to stumble into his apartment, she’d expected him to rip her dress off and drag her to the nearest couch — or bed. She’d expected him to be as desperate for it as she was. She’d estimated a thirty-minute event, start to finish, and then she planned to make her second French exit of the night once he was passed out.

It figures that he’d throw her a curveball.

Sarah squares her shoulders and kicks her shoes off. She can hear Holder rambling on about his secret egg recipe as he tears through the kitchen, pulling stuff out of cupboards and knocking around in the fridge. Pepper jelly this, cheddar cheese that, green onion something-something. His bizarre Martha Stewart behavior in the face of her sexual frustration is really starting to piss her off.

“Holder,” she calls. “What are you doing?”

He appears in the hall briefly, a bowl in one hand, a carton of eggs in the other, and a sleepy-sexy-drunk look on his face. “Cooking you breakfast,” he says, like she’s a little slow.

“Well, I don’t want food. So stop,” she orders, but he disappears into the kitchen again. She follows him, realizing as she does that she’s reached a new level of inebriation, one that includes not being able to walk a straight line.

“Just chill, Linden, and let me make you breakfast,” he says. He’s rattling around in his cutlery drawer, his back to her. “It’ll take, like, two minutes.”

Judging by the number of ingredients and cooking implements strewn out over every available surface, Sarah knows this is total bullshit. It’ll be a twenty-minute production at the very least, and there are much better ways they could spend that time.

She weaves towards him and nestles up against his back, enjoying the way he freezes and drops a spatula onto the counter. Sarah lets her eyes shutter closed, everything she’s come to associate with Holder permeating her senses. His tropical-strength body heat. The mingling scents of nicotine, hair products, and old clothes. And the inexplicable connection she’s felt with him since the beginning of the night slipping around her like an invisible lasso.

“I’m not interested in eggs,” she says quietly. When he doesn’t move, she slides her arms around his waist, flattening her palms low on his stomach. He flexes his abs, either for her benefit or just reflexively, but either way she’s impressed by the strength she feels there.

“You sure?” he asks tightly. It’s so quiet in the kitchen she can hear the second hand on a clock, somewhere. Her blood is sizzling and her heart is hammering and every nerve ending in her body is screaming for attention. She doesn’t want eggs. She doesn’t want to talk. She just wants _this._

“Holder,” she says, her voice low and breathless. She presses her face into his back. “I’m sure.”

Just to emphasize that, she pulls his shirt out from his pants, and he sucks in a breath as she slips her hands up onto hot skin and trails her fingers along the dips and curves of the muscles there.

“Okay. Fuck breakfast,” he mutters. He’s got both hands on the edge of the counter now, gripping it like it’s keeping him upright.

“Right. Fuck breakfast,” she agrees, leaning into him harder, and then she finds herself being spun around and pinned between the counter and Holder’s long body, and it’s a toss-up as to what’s harder.

He grabs a fistful of her hair and tilts her head to the side, burrowing into her neck. “I want you so fucking bad, Linden,” he whispers, and she feels it everywhere.

He’s all over her then, and Sarah gets completely lost in his warmth, his smell, the way he tastes, how he feels, the things he’s doing with his tongue. She doesn’t even care that, tomorrow, she’s going to have stubble burn on her face and a bruise on her back from being shoved into the edge of the counter and probably a goddamn hickey if he doesn’t stop attaching to her neck like a drunken vampire.

She starts working on his clothes, eagerly yanking off his horrible tie and throwing it across the room for good measure. The buttons on his shirt are tiny and cheap and next to impossible to get undone in her current state. She only fights through about half of them when she has to give up, because his hand is travelling down, down, down to ease under the hem of her dress.

“Jesus,” she pants as his fingers slide between her legs. She arches against the counter, one elbow knocking a bowl into the sink.  

There’s no finesse in the way he’s touching her, but she’s so excited and so drunk that precision isn’t necessary; just the pressure of his hand through her underwear kicks off a bloom of heat and a series of fireworks behind her eyelids. He doesn’t seem to know where to focus, so she grips his wrist, trying to steer him a little further north, a little to the side.

“How do you like it?” he murmurs in her ear after a while. “Tell me what to do.”

She should have kept her shoes on. Something about their position and their height difference is working against them — the angle isn’t right, even when she tilts her hips to try to make up for the way his hand is trapped under the twisted fabric of her dress. She tosses her head in frustration.

“I can’t…You’re too tall,” she manages.

Holder moves both hands to her waist and hoists her onto the counter, grabbing her ass to anchor her and pushing into her, just once, slow and hard. She moans into his mouth, locking her legs around his hips and urging him on when he does it again. It’s almost enough, just like that. She’s so far gone she could almost come just from this slow, teenage dry-hump on Holder’s cluttered kitchen counter.

And she doesn’t think he’s that far off himself, judging by how wild his eyes are when he lifts his head to stare at her with a dark, caveman-like look that roughly translates to _I am going to drag you into my cave and fuck you._ And it’s doing amazing things to her, that look.

“Yes, please,” she whispers, and he probably has no idea what she’s talking about, but he gets the general point because suddenly, he’s getting rid of all his clothes. With enthusiasm. He wrenches his half-undone shirt over his head and rips his pants open to let them drop to the floor, and Sarah is confronted with the overwhelming sight of an almost-naked Stephen Holder. A fresh shot of heat zips through her as she takes him in — he’s strong, but not huge. Firm. Perfect.

“I didn’t like your suit anyway,” she hears herself say, and he laughs, doing the awkward sock-removal jig, which she would probably find funny if she wasn’t so distracted by how good he looks.

He fits his hips between her knees again and eases them further apart, running his hands up her bare legs, his thumbs stroking the sensitive skin high up on her inner thighs. She hisses out a long breath and leans her head back onto the cabinets behind her. The world is starting to tilt sideways at the edges, either thanks to the alcohol or thanks to the fact that she’s so turned on she can’t see straight.

“Yeah, I hate what you’re wearing, too,” he breathes, his hands all the way up her dress now, fingers hooking over the sides of her underwear. He yanks them down and off her legs, and then he’s gone, a swirl of cool air taking the place of his body heat.

“What are you — ” she starts, but stops when she sees he’s dropped to his knees in front of her.

She almost wants to tell him not to bother, she’s past that point, could he please just fuck her right now? But he’s staring up her dress like it’s the best day of his life, and who is she to ruin that?

“This okay?” he asks, dragging his mouth up the inside of her thigh. His stubble leaves electric trails of goosebumps in its wake. She squirms on the counter, suddenly very glad she didn’t tell him not to bother.

“Um, yeah,” she pants. “Totally okay.”

For all the time he spent teasing her tonight, he doesn’t make her wait now. He pushes her legs open, shoves her dress up, and at the first touch of his tongue on her skin she jumps so hard she almost knocks herself unconscious on the cabinets.

“Oh, God,” she says loudly, and those are the last coherent words that leaves her mouth.

He's imprecise but enthusiastic, and she enters a strange binary world where she fluctuates between mindless bliss when he gets it right and total sober awareness when he doesn’t. Thoughts like, _oh that’s fucking perfect,_ are followed by, _is it ironic that this is happening in the kitchen? Jesus Christ that’s amazing… Does he actually own an apron?_

He’s at the perfect height down there on his knees, and she’s hoping that’s just a happy coincidence rather than something he’s learned from previous experience, because she’s having a moment. She wants to be the only woman he’s done this to, like this, in the kitchen, like he couldn’t wait ten seconds to get her into the bedroom.

It’s that heady thought that makes her relax enough to go with it. She doesn’t resist when he throws her legs over his shoulders to get closer — instead, she tells him he’s getting it right and how to keep getting it right. When he finally sets up the perfect rhythm in exactly the right spot, she grabs fistfuls of his hair, crunching through the gel.

She can’t stop making noise now, strings of incoherent moans and pants and whines and monosyllabic nonsense words. That topple into oblivion, she can feel it coming, like a thunderclap in the distance. When he slides two fingers inside her she almost levitates off the counter, and it’s only a minute later that she hurtles over the edge, the tremors tearing through her body with a force she hasn’t felt in years, leaving her shaking and panting and hanging onto his hair like it’s the only thing tethering her to earth.

When she regains some semblance of awareness, she realizes he’s standing up again, and she’s collapsed onto his shoulder. She can’t move her extremities. She can’t open her eyes. She can’t think straight.

“You gonna fall asleep on me?” he whispers into her hair.

Sarah shifts slightly, brushing her hand along the hot, hard length of him. His hips jerk towards her touch.

“Mmmm,” she mumbles into his neck. “Definitely not.”

*** * * * ***

He has to carry her to the bedroom. She gripes about it a bit, but the truth is she doesn’t think she can walk, and it’s not the worst thing in the world, even though she would _never_ let it happen in any other circumstance. She wouldn’t even let Greg carry her into the emergency room when she sprained her ankle when she was seven months pregnant with Jack.

Holder lays her on the bed, and she casts her eyes around his bedroom for a second — it’s sparse, not neat exactly, but not a disaster either, considering he probably didn’t anticipate company. Tons of books. Bike mounted on the wall. Football helmet on top of the dresser. And all of it is starting to spin, just slightly. She grabs the sheets in a lame attempt to make it stop.

He’s hovering over her, his hands plucking at the side of her dress. “How do you undo this thing?” he mutters. She smiles at how confused he looks.

“There’s no zipper,” she says. “Just pull it off.”

“For real?” he asks, standing up and scratching the back of his head.

She laughs, twisting to get her arms out of the shoulder straps. “Yes. It’s stretchy.”

He starts tugging it down, his face lighting up when he sees she’s not wearing a bra. He’s obviously a breast man, and he gets lost there for a while, big hands palming her, thumbs sliding over her nipples to make way for his tongue. She arches into him, breathing hard, and then huffs in frustration when his warm mouth disappears suddenly — and doesn’t come back.

He’s still in the vicinity, but he’s picking something out of the fabric of her dress and holding it up for inspection. Sarah squints through the darkness to try to see what it is. Is it food? It could be. She might have been drunk enough at dinner to drop rice down her dress. Maybe some potato.

“That _was_ a good shot,” he says, holding whatever it is up in front of her face. It’s not food, thank God — it’s the napkin ball he flicked at her earlier. Sarah stares at it for a second, and then she’s laughing. Hard. Like it’s the funniest thing she’s ever seen.

Holder grins down at her, propped up on an elbow, looking amused and a little perplexed. “Yo, you wanna keep this? It could be, like, a souvenir, or whatever.”

She shakes her head, wiping her eyes. His smile changes, softens a little, and his eyes drop down to the napkin ball and then up to hers again. “You got a great laugh, Linden. You should do it more.”

Sarah can feel the air pressure change, the beginnings of a warning needling at her skin. The look on his face is too warm, too sweet, too open. So she pushes her dress down the rest of the way, rolling her hips to get it off, sending it flying into a corner of the room with a swift kick of her leg. That look is better, she thinks, taking in his dilated pupils and the way he’s holding his jaw tight, like he’s trying to control himself.

When they’re trying to get the condom on is the first time she sees some of his overgrown cockiness slip. His hands are shaking, and she looks up at his face in surprise. There’s nervousness there, too.

So she’s nice about it and gently closes her fingers over his to get the show on the road, instead of impatiently ripping the foil packet out of his hands. His eyes flick up to hers and the uncertainty slips behind the mask again.

“Gotta do everything?” he teases, but he lets her take it and runs his hands along her thighs as she splits the package. There’s no sign of the tremors from before as his palms heat her skin — just her own muscles jumping under his touch.

When she rolls the condom down his cock, his hands clutch at her legs and his eyes drop shut, a look of total concentration on his face. She’s calculating, measuring his size with her eyes and the slow path of her circled fingers from top to bottom. It’s been a while, and he’s big. Really big. But not as ridiculous as the last guy from a few years ago, and thank God for that because she’d had to call it quits midway through on that guy. It was physically impossible.

“Okay,” she breathes, half to herself.

His eyes pop open, and she sees that dangerous look again for a second, but then he blinks and grins and tugs her by the hips so she’s closer to the edge of the bed, and all she can think about is how badly she wants it.

She’s almost embarrassingly wet, and she sees his eyes bug out at that as he starts to slide in. She’s panting just with the slow first pass. It’s so good.

“Christ. Holy fuck,” he groans, his elbows landing on either side of her head. He’s too tall, and he’s on her hair, but she doesn’t care at the moment, just arches up to take him in all the way and locks her ankles against the small of his back. The sensation is half discomfort and half incredible fullness and a little bit of something else that’s more emotional than physical and all of it together makes her eyes fill up.

His face is bowed into the top of her head so he doesn’t see, and she blinks hard to move past it. He starts moving, and she strains to meet him, pushing her body further towards the pleasure-pain boundary with each slow thrust. Her legs are shaking in earnest now, because she hasn’t even recovered from what he did to her in the kitchen, and it’s like he’s already undoing her again.

Holder lifts off her a little, bracing one arm above her head. “You good?” he asks, his voice low and rough. Sarah can only nod. She’s practically useless. It’s total sensory overload.

He sets up a slow rhythm at first, and all she can do is loop her arms around his shoulders and hang on. He’s too tall to kiss her and fuck her at the same time, so he stops trying, and she buries her face in his chest. It’s good, and easy in a way she didn’t expect it to be. The champagne and the reality of her three-year dry spell are spinning magic out of what should have been a quick, awkward, boozy fumble.

His pace starts picking up after a while, and she tosses her head back, moaning in approval.

“Gonna come for me again?” he grunts, and she can’t tell if he’s asking or demanding, but the mere suggestion that this is a possibility has her thinking she could, it’s possible, maybe, maybe, she just needs —

She cries out as his hand works its way between their bodies, his thumb landing exactly where she needs it by some miracle, and then suddenly, she can feel it. She’s so close, like she skipped a step or three, each quick snap of his hips shooting her nearer to what she knows is going to be a world-shattering orgasm. He’s fucking her so hard they’re sliding up the bed, and she flails her hands out to try to find purchase on something, anything, because she can’t lose that contact, she needs leverage to keep his hand in the right spot.

Holder shifts his weight slightly, and that’s all it takes. It hits her on an exhale, without warning, and she’s imploding, a thousand tiny spots of light converging in one place. Somewhere far away she can hear her own breathy moans and gasps and her alcohol-and-sex voice chanting _yes yes yes yes yes_ like if she stops, it’ll be over. It can’t end. She needs this to go on forever. She needs to be turned inside out like this forever.

But it can’t last forever, of course, and the waves stop coming eventually, and then she’s floating somewhere dark and quiet and warm, an odd, indescribable sense of peace easing through her body. She comes back into awareness slowly, hardly knowing who she is or where she is or who this man is, staring at her like he’s just seen something incredible. Swampwater, she thinks out of nowhere. I'm with Swampwater.

Time is escaping her. It could have been seconds since she came, or it could have been hours, and she’d have no idea. But judging by the fact that he’s still inside her, looking like he might be in pain, she thinks it hasn’t been that long.

She grows conscious of her body, her legs locked around his hips, her arms around his neck, although she doesn’t remember putting them there. The muscles in his back are trembling. She blinks through the fog and tilts her head to see him better.

“You’re quiet,” she observes. It seems like the first time that night that he’s had nothing to say. “It’s okay to move, if you want,” she adds. And he exhales hard.

He tries, but his rhythm from before is gone, and he’s spending more time adjusting his arms and attempting to avoid her hair than he is fucking her. Sarah has a thought then, a suspicion that’s verified when she realizes he doesn’t feel as big inside her anymore. Something’s up. Or not up.

He’s too drunk to finish.

She knows she didn’t say it out loud. She’s not that stupid. But it’s like he suddenly knows she knows, and she watches him start spiralling as the combination of alcohol and second-guessing himself starts to work against him. He freezes, up on both arms above her, looking everywhere but at her face.

“Uh,” he stammers. “I don’t…um... _fuck.”_

Sarah gazes up at his panicked face. It’s not her first rodeo. She’s encountered this particular dilemma once or twice before. She knows it’s going to take some serious energy to salvage the situation. But God she’s drunk, and part of her just wants to call it a night, because she’s about thirty minutes from either throwing up or passing out. Maybe both.

But part of her also wants to make him come harder than he’s ever come before.

Holder eases off her slowly and slides out. He doesn’t leave, or turn away, which she half-expected him to. Instead, he’s just standing there with his hands on his hips, staring down at his half-hard dick like he’s having a mental pep talk with it. If she wasn’t sure it would crush him, she’d laugh.

Sarah shifts up onto her elbows and starts rifling through her mental rolodex of Things That Make Men Come. She flips to D.

Dirty talk? Doggie style?

Both, she decides, taking in his stony expression.

“Holder,” she whispers, sitting up and kneeling in front of him on the mattress. For the first time tonight, they’re the same height, but he won’t look her in the eyes.

“Can I tell you something?” she whispers, running her fingertips along the strong muscles sloping over his shoulders. His gaze is somewhere near her chin. “All night,” she continues, her hands tracing slow paths over his chest, “I was thinking about fucking you.”

The only indication he’s heard her are the muscles in his jaw tensing.

She leans forward and presses her mouth to his, coaxing him back to her. “On the balcony especially,” she says against his lips. She feels his hands then, on her hips, sliding up her back to round her shoulders and pull her closer.

“Do you want to know what I pictured?” she whispers. He’s looking at her now.

“Yeah,” he says, so low she can barely hear it.

“I imagined you coming up behind me … bending me over … and fucking me, right against the railing.”

Holder’s eyes lock tight to hers, his nostrils flaring slightly. “Yeah?” he growls.

Sarah nods, shifting closer to him and watching his hazel eyes darken and glitter as she describes how badly she wanted it, how she would have begged him to fuck her harder, how hot it would have been to do it out in the open like that, where anyone could have seen them. Or heard them.

It doesn’t matter whether any of it is true. It just matters that he believes it, and she can tell he does. There’s something stirring now, she’s almost positive.

“Turn around, baby,” he whispers. She risks a quick glance downward as she does, and she knows she’s hit the target. He’s definitely recovered.

His hand settles between her shoulder blades and urges her forward, and she props herself up on her hands as he runs his palms over her hips. She hears him whisper _fuck,_ just barely, and she wants to say something obvious like _that’s the idea,_ but then she feels the weight of his right hand leave her hip, and he’s shifting to get the angle right, and then he’s back, filling her up completely. 

Sarah gasps, locking her elbows. The angle is much deeper than before, and she sees stars as her body tries to figure out whether it’s pleasure or pain. Pleasure, she decides as she rocks back to meet him, circling her hips. Pleasure.

“Yeah, that’s good,” he groans. “That’s fucking _good,_ Linden.”

She moans in reply, concentrating on keeping herself upright and pushing back to try to get him to pick up the pace. She’s too far gone to be moved by anything slow and steady — she needs intensity, abandon.

“Faster,” she begs, tossing her head to get her hair out of her face.

“Yeah?” he pants. He pulls her in tighter, one hand sliding roughly up her back to grab her shoulder for leverage. She arches her back, gasping. Perfect. “Like that?”

“Yes,” she breathes, squeezing her eyes shut. Her ears are filled with the sounds of his harsh breaths, the sharp scrape of her nails on the sheets, the wet slap of his body driving into hers. “God, yes, just like that.”

She’s spinning, swirling in a cloud of pure sensation. She’s nothing but a collection of haphazardly-firing neurons and over-sensitive nerve endings, every muscle in her body twitching and trembling. It’s too much and not enough all at the same time, this perfect pace and the way he’s digging his fingers into her skin and the rough, desperate tone in his voice as he tells her how good she feels.

It’s not long before the tremors in her arms win out and she starts sliding forward, slowly collapsing onto the mattress with her face pressed into the sheets. He grabs her waist and hauls her hips back up, pulling her in tight. She can feel him start to tense up, his movements becoming erratic as he gets closer.

“Oh, fuck,” he grinds out. “Fuck. _Fuck,_ Sarah, I’m gonna come —” 

He stiffens up and cries out, his hands clamping onto her hips so hard her eyes pop open. She tries to wait while he rides it out, winding down with a few more sloppy thrusts, but her legs can’t function anymore, and she collapses flat onto her stomach. He follows her down, covering her like a 180-pound blanket.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he says, panting hard into the back of her head. He seems content to just lie there, but he’s way too heavy, so she elbows him to make him move. He shifts his weight off her, and she takes a big breath of relief.

He’s saying something. She thinks maybe he got up, he might be in another room, because she hears his voice like it’s very far away, tinny and small in the echo chamber of her brain. She fights to pay attention, to open her eyes, to stay awake, but the endorphins and the exhaustion coursing through her body have rendered her practically comatose.

The gentle stroke of a hand between her shoulder blades drags her back from the brink of sleep. “Take these,” he says, pressing two pills into her palm. She blinks blearily at him.

“Ibuprofen and vitamin B,” he tells her, then disappears from view.

She waits, but he doesn’t bring her water, so she just swallows them dry and feels them travel inch by inch down her esophagus, to her stomach. Her head feels uncomfortably light, like it’s inflated with helium. Or champagne bubbles.

She needs water. She needs to get up and get dressed. She needs to find her phone so she can call a cab. She needs to never wear heels again for any reason.

The bed dips beside her, and six-feet-something of warm man settles against her side. His hand slides over her back in a slow circle, then rests heavy in the curve of her spine right above her ass, and it’s the last thing she feels before she passes out.

 


	8. Simple vs Easy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So sorry this has taken so long! I am really not _trying_ to post only on holidays, but happy new year!
> 
> Huge thanks to **stayseated** as always and special thanks to **lilysmum** for her amazing consulting services  <3

Every morning, Sarah wakes up before her alarm goes off. Those first few moments of consciousness are a perfect blank space, absent of all thought, feeling, memory, and experience. None of her tattered baggage weighs her down. It’s the kind of sensory deprivation a person like her craves.

Waking up is her favorite time of day. Except at this particular moment. 

She jerks awake like she’s just been body-slammed into a wall, muscles from head to toe spasming briefly. Her headache hits her the hardest. There’s a freight train travelling circles at full speed inside her tender, glass-thin skull. Her tongue is stuck to the roof of her mouth, her throat is aching for water, her stomach is twisting threateningly, and Jesus, her feet feel like they’re two sizes too big for her skin.

Dazed, she turns her head a little so her face isn’t pressed right into the sheets. She always sleeps with the window open, and she’s craving fresh air like it’ll cure all her ills. But the room smells different. Masculine. Kind of musty. And there’s another smell, one she recognizes in a distant, half-remembered way.

Sex. 

Her eyes fly open, details flooding back to her with alarming speed and clarity as the puzzle pieces of her night fit themselves together. Drinking. Smoking. Hazel eyes and a smartass mouth. Dancing. Cab rides. Kitchen counters. Orgasms — plural, she’s pretty sure. 

Holder. She went home with Holder. And she hasn’t left yet.

Sarah grips the edge of the mattress, staring into the unfamiliar darkness of his bedroom. Fuck, is all she can think. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Holder has a swimsuit model calendar hanging on the wall across from the bed — a pouty brunette gazing vapidly into the distance from her unlikely perch on a lifeguard stand — and Sarah stares at it balefully as she tries to summon the energy to get up. Passing out was an amateur move, and she’s no amateur. But then again, she’s also not typically saturated with champagne and tequila and God knows what else she drank.

She takes a deep breath, picturing the steps she has to take. First, get up. The trick is to roll slowly out of the bed so he won’t feel the mattress move. Works every time. Then, find his bathroom. Pee. Make sure the stream hits the bowl and not the water to keep the noise level down. Don’t bother flushing. Find the following items: dress, underwear, shoes, purse. Exit his apartment as quietly as possible. Keep the doorknob turned when the door closes so that the latch doesn’t click shut too loud. Get out on the street, figure out where the hell he lives, and call a cab.

Easy.

It  _ would _ be easy, if only the room would stop spinning. She’s out of the bed and a few steps towards the door when she realizes just how unlikely it is that she’ll be able to execute on her plan. She’s so dizzy and nauseous she has to resort to a half-crouched walk, her arms held out for balance, and try as she might, her legs aren’t taking her to the bedroom door. She’s knocking into the wall, stumbling through piles of clothes on the floor, weaving so hard on her feet she’s not even sure whether she’s moving closer to her target or farther from it.

There’s a crumpled pile of fabric by the door, and she thinks it might be her dress. She jolts towards it, but when she stoops down to grab it, her stomach clenches and roils, and then her pinball trajectory is carrying her down the dark hallway to what she prays is the bathroom, because she’s got about ten seconds before she throws up.

She manages to kick the door shut and collapse over the toilet before her stomach tries to invert itself.

Sarah retches loudly into the bowl and swears she will never, ever drink again.

*** * * * ***

After a long period of non-productive gagging and half-hearted attempts to bring something up other than bile, Sarah concedes defeat and lays her head on her folded arms over the toilet bowl, drifting in and out of consciousness while she waits for her stomach to settle.

She should have just let Holder cook her breakfast. Food might have saved her from this unnecessary trip down memory lane to that time she drank a sixpack in under an hour at Joel Farley’s 15th birthday.

She shivers, chilled by her extended visit to the cold tile of the bathroom floor. She casts a hand around behind her, trying to move as little as possible while she searches out her dress. Her fingers snag the fabric, which is thick and heavy and gigantic, and definitely not her dress.

She lifts her head even though it feels like she’s wearing a 200-pound hat and stares at the hooded sweatshirt she’s holding. “What the hell,” she whispers. She has no idea how she could have mistaken it for her dress in the first place. It’s not even blue. It’s light gray, almost white.

She blinks defeatedly and shrugs into the sweatshirt, which isn’t part of the plan, but she’s too cold and too sick to care, and her plan is all fucked up anyway.

She drags herself over to the sink and gulps down huge mouthfuls of water, drinks until she thinks she might actually be sick. When that doesn’t happen, she paws through Holder’s sparse bathroom supplies and makes good use of his ibuprofen and his toothpaste. She goes back for a little more water, then splashes some on her face and uses the giant sweatshirt to dry it.

She’s decided she’ll head for the couch to sleep for a few more hours. That way she still has a chance of sneaking out unnoticed. But when she shuffles and bumps her way past the bedroom door, she sees him pop up on the bed. 

“Yo,” he rasps. It sounds like he swallowed sandpaper. He brandishes a bottle of Gatorade and a bag of chips at her, his hair sticking up in all directions. “You need food?”

“Mmm,” she mumbles noncommittally. She doesn’t move from the doorway, trapped in a no man’s land between drunk and hungover, between hungry and nauseous, between a decades-long instinct to run and a deep, desperate desire to get back in his bed and sleep for another 20 hours.

“I see you found a hoodie you like,” he says, grinning knowingly.

She looks down, shrugging. It hangs to her knees. “Thought it was my dress.”

“Why you tryin’ to get dressed? It’s like, three in the morning. Come back to bed.”

She hesitates, excuses piling up on the tip of her tongue. Holder tilts his head and runs his hands through his hair. It springs right back into disarray.

“Yeah, lemme guess,” he says. “You have some kinda stupid girl rule, like,  _ I don’t do sleepovers _ —” Sarah almost laughs at his awful, lispy falsetto, “— but I’m gonna tell you something. You already slept, so your rule ain’t worth shit. Just come chill for a bit.”

A wave of the spins hits her, and she grabs the doorjamb tight. She needs to lie down. Just long enough to eat some of those chips and recover. Then she’ll leave. Her shoulders drop and she sighs, edging towards the bed.

“Just for a few minutes,” she says firmly, crawling into the bed and wrapping the covers around herself. The twisting in her stomach eases off a little as she settles deeper into the pillows.

“What color?” Holder asks, waving two Gatorades. She points to the red one. He cracks the spout for her, passing it over.

Holder rips open the chips and tosses the bag and a pack of cigarettes between them. He’s on his side, hovering his hand over the stash like he’s presenting something amazing to her.

“Check it, Linden,” he says, grinning. “I mean, what more could you want?”

*** * * * ***

The chips are incredible, she discovers, after nibbling cautiously at a few. Lay’s Wavy Original. She knows because she keeps looking at the bag, determined to remember what they are despite her alcohol-dulled mental capacity so she can go pick some up later. They’re working some kind of miracle on her stomach. And they’re delicious.

But the best thing about them is that she can eat them lying down. She can drink the Gatorade that way, too, thanks to the sport lid. Holder tells her he buys it for this very reason.

“Are you hungover that often?” she asks, fishing out another chip.

“Never a dull moment, Linden. You should hang out with me more. I know how to show a lady a good time.”

“Mmm,” she huffs. He’s been angling towards this for a while now, little offhand comments and remarks about how they should see each other again. She’s been ignoring them, because he hasn’t straight out  _ asked  _ to see her again, and she doesn’t plan to deal with it until he does.

Holder angles the bag back towards himself, shaking it to find the unbroken chips. She licks salt and grease off her fingers and stares at him through narrowed eyes. The Sarah Linden she knows would never stick around for a late-night picnic in a man’s bed, shitfaced or not. And yet, here she is. All night, he’s been blowing past all her warning signals and hopping her meticulously-constructed emotional barriers. Her mind supplies an image of her drawing sharp, straight lines of chalk on pavement, and Holder coming by and scuffing them up with his cheap shoes, forcing her to redraw them around him.

As intriguing as it’s been, as it still is, she knows logically that there can’t be anything more to this thing between them than this night, this morning. And she’s okay with that. She has to be okay with that. Because Holder pre-plans his hangover snacks so that he won’t have to leave his bed all day. And she pre-plans meals, the sitter’s schedule, drama-free bedtime strategies, dentist appointments, soccer registration, school drop-off and pickup, and about a million other things that would make his eyes bug out and his dick shrivel up.

And she wouldn't trade any of it for Holder’s freewheeling, independent existence. Jack is the best gift life has given her. Holder just happened to catch her on an extremely rare day when her needs finally pushed themselves up to the surface through all her layers of responsibility and obligation. He wouldn’t know what to do with her on a regular day. No one ever has, really.

“I had a good time tonight,” he says, interrupting her introspection. His teeth flash in the darkness as he grins at her. “You’re fun, Linden.”

She snorts, pulling the chips back her way. “Most people would disagree.”

“Most people are ass clowns,” he replies. “Seriously, though, why hasn’t Haines ever introduced us?”

Sarah quirks an eyebrow at him. Here he goes again. “Because I don’t date. Remember?”

“Right,” he says, mock-serious. “Jack.”

“Yup. Jack.”

“Well, I’m pretty sure tonight qualifies as a date, so you’re gonna need to adjust your stance on dating.”

She takes a swig from her Gatorade, waiting. She can tell he’s been thinking about this, maybe practicing it in his head.

“There was dinner,” he starts. “Drinks.  _ Dancing, _ even, Linden.” He’s ticking things off on his fingers as he goes, and for the first time she notices a light, almost delicate tattoo etched onto his bicep. Some kind of floral scrollwork. Not what she would have expected, but not much about him is what she expected.

“And then  _ someone _ got all handsy in the cab,” he continues, ticking this off on his finger too and looking pointedly at her.

“Me?” she says, her voice pitched higher than she wants it to be. “Whatever. I wasn’t the one giving out foot rubs.”

He laughs, his hand circling her knee beneath the blankets. She jumps at the contact. “Yeah, maybe not. But I seem to remember you enjoying yourself. A lot,” he says quietly, his voice low.

“Not really,” she lies, distracted by the way his finger is stroking the crook of her knee. He’s much closer to her now, his dark eyes flashing from under hooded lids, his mouth cocked in a half-smile that’s more predatory than amused. 

She lets her mind drift back, trying to recapture the detail of it, of the way he’d touched her in the cab and the kitchen and here in his bedroom, the slide of his hands on her skin, the weight of his body, his breath on her neck. She shifts slightly, angling her knee a little higher, and his fingers move up to trace over back of her thigh, making her breath go shallow and her blood quicken under suddenly warm skin.

Sarah can point to a million reasons why her and Holder would never work in a real way. She can name them, number them, and line them up, like pieces of evidence. What she can’t name, or number, or even identify in a way that satisfies her, is why it’s still so easy to be here with him, despite it all. But just because something is easy doesn’t mean it’s simple, and that’s something she knows for sure. Still, when he leans down to kiss her, it feels like the most natural thing in the world.

He tastes like Gatorade and potato chip salt and beneath that, the warm, slightly spicy essence she’s come to associate with Holder. She soaks up the heat of his touch, his palm tracking up her thigh, wrapping around it and lifting her leg over both of his. The chip bag crinkles between them, flattened somewhere between the crumpled blankets and their bodies. 

She exhales hard against his mouth as he slides his fingers against her without any preamble, slow and lazy, one finger inside her, then two, an interminable, maddening tease. Outside, the tangled cries of a few seagulls float through the quiet of early morning, mingling with the slip of their skin on the sheets and the pounding of her blood in her ears. Her teeth snag his earlobe and she just catches the quick, barely audible hitch in his throat when her tongue follows. Something new and unfamiliar tugs loose deep inside her at that sound, pulls at her tightly-sewn edges just a bit, like a popped stitch. 

Holder grabs her waist and hikes her leg even higher on his hips, and before she can even pause to wonder whether this position will work for them, he’s halfway inside.

Her body isn’t quite ready — she’s not totally surprised, given the sexual gymnastics she’s already put it through — but she forces the issue, locks her leg around his hips and urges him forward, and even the gentle stretch and sting feels incredible as he pushes all the way in.

It just takes a few strokes for her to catch up, and then she’s flying. Her whole world is reduced to the feeling of him inside her, how he’s holding her close, his warm breath on her neck and his strong shoulders under her hands. Sarah seeks out his mouth, his tongue, the scratch of his overgrown stubble, his breath mixed with hers. He kisses her hard, slow, just like he’s fucking her, and she can’t get close enough.  

He grabs her and rolls them so she’s on top, pushing the giant sweatshirt up and off her, his breath coming hard and fast. It’s perfect now, perfect, and she sits back and rides him until she can barely see, she’s so close her vision is blurring. He presses a palm into her abdomen, down low on her belly, and something about the pressure kicks off the beginnings of it, the threads of control snapping loose and flying away as her body takes over. The orgasm hits her hard, from deep inside, and she curls forward and grabs at the hard muscles of his chest as she rides it out, gasping and panting and trying to fuck him through all of it, because it just feels so, so good.

She rests on his chest for a while after that, half-awake, letting him stroke her back and comb through her hair, the rise and fall of his ribcage lifting her entire torso. He shifts slightly, still long and hard inside her, and she rises up to hover her face over his, intending to kiss him, but his expression stops her in her tracks. It’s potent mixture of disbelief and gratitude, the look of someone who rarely gets what he needs, who's spent his whole life not getting what he needs, so he's stopped asking. Something quick and strong sneaks around her heart at that look, at the idea that she’s somehow given him something, whatever it is he was looking for. That, more than any other complex, confused emotion she’s felt with him tonight, scares her.

So she rolls her hips against him, bringing him back to the present, and his eyes squeeze shut and she lands the kiss she was aiming for, snaking her tongue around his while his hands clamp onto her hips and show her the rhythm he needs.

She leans back and grips his thighs as he does most of the hard work. She can’t quite look at him, so she lets her eyes slip shut and her head tilt back, focusing on the physical, moving her hands over his so he’ll touch her, guiding his palms up her chest and over her breasts and down to cup her ass.

Just when she thinks he’s almost there, he stalls out, swearing under his breath.

“What?” she breathes, her eyes popping open. He’s got a wild, confused look on his face.

“Fuck … I wasn’t thinking,” he mutters, glancing at the box of condoms on the table beside his bed, and that’s when she realizes they’re not even using one. She looks down in surprise, as if she expects him to be wrong, looking for a glint of latex, but there’s nothing. He reaches over, his hand falling about a foot short, while she sits there and thinks that she should care. She should care, she knows better, she should just reach over and grab a damn condom. But she hasn’t felt this good in weeks — months — years, maybe, and she can’t bear the thought of stopping now.

Holder squirms, trying harder to reach the box. When she makes no move to help him, he glances up at her, his eyes searching her face. “Uh, I’m totally clean, if you —”

“I’m on the pill,” she says, the lie slipping off her tongue like water. 

She knows that just a block down from the WAC, there’s a 24-hour pharmacy. Everything about that place is etched into her memory. Because in the wee hours of her second day as a patrol officer, she’d spent an hour there picking up about 24 bottles of mixed antivirals, the ancient pharmacist patiently, regretfully explaining each one in painful detail, because on her first day as a patrol officer, she’d been bitten. By a weathered junkie with a face like a jack-o-lantern who then gleefully screamed, “I got AIDS, ya pig bitch, now you do too!” 

She didn’t, but she had to pop pills for three weeks while she waited for her blood test to clear.

So thanks to modern medicine and that 24-hour pharmacy, she can take care of the no-condom situation in a little while, when she goes to pick up her car. The thought invigorates her somehow, the idea of brushing past the Sunday morning early risers, them trying to get a few errands done before church, and her standing in line at the pharmacy, freshly fucked, skin still glowing and his scent still in her hair, ordering her morning-after pill and accepting all of their judgment because her night was just  _ that _ fucking good.

Holder doesn’t last long once he starts up again, driving into her so hard her teeth knock together. 

When he comes, she can’t take her eyes off him.

*** * * * ***

“What are you doing later?” he whispers into the darkness, his fingers tracing a path up and down her hip. Her heart rate hasn’t even settled yet, and it picks up again when she hears the gravity in his voice. She doesn’t want this exact moment to be the time she has to break it to him for real. Not right now.

Sarah shifts on her pillow, glancing over at him. “I have stuff to do,” she says simply.

_ Please leave it alone. Please leave it alone. _

“What stuff?”

She stills his hand with hers, goes for a gentle squeeze and a shift in her position to buy herself a little physical space while she debates what to tell him. How to answer the real question he’d asked her, which isn’t what she’s doing today. It’s whether he can see her again.

“Well,” she starts, lining up her day in her mind. She has to get back to the WAC and pick up her car. It’ll cost her a fortune for the overnight valet. She has to get home and shower and change before she picks Jack up from Regi’s — there’s no way she can show up in her clothes from last night. She’d never hear the end of it. Jack needs new shoes, and this is her only day off this week, so she’ll have to drag him to the mall to find a decent pair he won’t destroy in a month. Then she has to drag him through the grocery store because they’re out of pretty much everything, and she has  _ got _ to get some of these chips. She has about four loads of laundry to do, because she’s been working so much she hasn’t had a chance recently. And she’s got an evening shift coming up this week, so somewhere in there she has to call the sitter to make sure she can adjust her hours. She can’t forget to do that.

But she doesn’t say any of that in the end, knowing that all of it will sound like excuses to him, which is part of the problem. Most of the problem. So all she says is, “Just … stuff.”

“Sounds legitimate,” he deadpans, and she hears the smile in his voice. It makes her heart sink a little lower. “Come on. Come see a movie with me. Bring Jack. Snakes on a Plane looks  _ dope, _ right? But a later show, cuz I’m gonna nap the  _ shit  _ outta this day first.”

She casts him a quick glance from her pillow, trying to return his casual smile. “Not exactly appropriate for an eight-year-old,” she says, thinking that could apply to Holder as much as the movie.

“Aw, it ain’t that bad. Some snakes, some shooting, some swearing, big deal. He’ll love it. Come on.”

She lets the night air fill the space she can’t, the words swirling in her head but not quite making their way into full sentences. She stares at the ceiling when she finally tells him she can’t, not later and not ever. She can’t bring herself to watch how his face falls. 

*** * * * ***

Dress, underwear, shoes, purse. 

She stands in the doorway of his bedroom, early morning light just beginning to wash through the air and warm up the shadows. Holder slumbers on. 

Sarah sighs, rubs a hand over tired eyes. She’s been lingering for too long, her stomach knotting with a strange mix of emotions she can’t isolate or identify. She steps back, cloaked in the shadows of the hall, and whispers, “Sorry,” into the silence.

He doesn’t move. She slips through the front door, making sure to keep the doorknob turned so the latch doesn’t click shut too loud, and doesn’t look back.


	9. Knock and Announce

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This picks up the morning after, but I felt like Holder deserved the last word. 
> 
> Thanks to Mr. Robot for a great line that I have lovingly re-purposed. And endless thanks to **stayseated** , gentle but efficient killer of unnecessary lines and overly-romantic notions. <3

The first time Stephen wakes up that morning, he feels pretty fucking good. Sure, he’s alone, and yeah, his hangover has him feeling like ten pounds of crushed assholes stuffed into a five pound bag — but the important thing is, it happened. He hooked up with a _fine_ -ass woman. He got laid. Twice. And the resulting bone-deep satiation is enough to lull him back to sleep — the first time.

But the next time he wakes up, he’s a little closer to sober, and the sex high he was riding has ebbed its way out of his chest, leaving behind a strange sense of having screwed something up, screwed it up in a way so big he can’t even see it.

He does his best to ignore the self-doubt and fights his way back into a restless sleep, but every time he opens his eyes, he’s deeper in it. It’s a strange fog of nothingness that somehow seems both empty and oppressive. It sits on his chest, squeezes out an unfamiliar feeling he doesn’t have a word for. He’s not sad, exactly. He’s been sad before. This is something else. A kind of deadened numbness, and beneath that, a surprising mix of confusion and resentment. Like a door he didn’t know existed slammed shut in his face the second he found it.

It reminds him exactly of being fifteen, and trying to figure out why his mom left. And that’s all kinds of fucked up.

He rolls over, forces himself to sit up. He’s no pussy. He doesn’t plan to simmer in this shit. And by the way the bile is creeping up his throat, he knows it’s gonna get real unless he gets up and eats something.

He skulks through his apartment like a zombie, squinting at the unwelcome intrusion of midday sunlight. His kitchen is a goddamn disaster — shit everywhere. He moves on autopilot, throwing out most of the food and putting all the bowls and utensils and pots and pans back.

And then he sees the note on the counter, with forty bucks tucked under it. It’s just a sloppy scrawl on the back of an envelope — she’d used his electric bill, which he hasn’t even opened yet — and all she’d written was:

_For the cab._

And then:

_I’m_

Which she’d scribbled out and replaced with:

_Thanks_.

No number.

He stares at it like it’s written in Swahili. The fact that she doesn’t want to owe him anything makes him feel shittier than anything else.

He can take a hint. It was a cut-and-dry hit-and-run, no matter how different it felt to him. She wasn’t exactly subtle about that last night, even though it took her forever to actually say the words — some bullshit about it being a one-time thing, how this could never work, how he didn’t really know her, blah blah blah. He tuned most of it out.

She might think he doesn’t know her, but he does. He might not know all her dirty secrets, but he knows the kind of person she is. He knows it in his bones. They’re cut from the same cloth, him and Linden. Two people stuck on the fringes of normalcy in different ways, trying to get out from under their baggage but not really knowing how.

He barely ever gets lucky, and he definitely never gets lucky with someone like Linden. His luck runs more to dark fumbles in smoky bars, drunk girls with too much shit on their faces and no sense of humor. Girls who feel awkward in his arms and say what they think he wants to hear and never give him any clue if he’s getting it right.

So he knows this was different. He saw something in the way she looked at him. She didn’t look at him like other girls do, like she was too good for him, like she was slumming it for the night. She looked at him like she knew who he was, and she was okay with it. Like she was wishing for something.

*** * * * ***

He can’t shake her.

Days blend into weeks, and she’s still there, hovering at the edges of his mind like a dream he can’t fully remember.

He doesn’t tell a soul about what happened. Not even when all the County clowns who’d been at the wedding come sniffing around in the days after, looking for confirmation that he’d fucked Linden. He plays them off, no problem. Not because he thinks she doesn’t want anyone to know — although, guaranteed she doesn’t. He just doesn’t need anyone asking questions or making comments about her that he knows will make him feel things he doesn’t want to feel — protective, defensive, ready to lay anyone out who talks shit about her.

He tries not to think about her, which is next to impossible considering how epic the sex was. His mind wanders there sometimes, when he’s too tired to stop it, and he dives back into the memories of her hot little mouth, her absolutely perfect tits, the sounds she’d made in the kitchen, the bossy way she’d told him what to do and when to do it, how she’d writhed and panted underneath him like he was rocking her fucking world. It makes the breath catch in his throat and his dick twitch impatiently, like it’s still waiting for her to come back.

More often, though, he slips back into recalling snippets of their conversations or remembers little things about that night, like how she always seemed to know where he was, her eyes pegging him from 50 feet away over the rim of her champagne glass. Or the twisted-up little smile she kept giving him, like she thought his jokes were funny but she didn’t want him to _know_ she thought they were funny. And the way she went out onto that balcony with him, like she was curious about him. And how she listened to him talk like she actually gave a fuck about what he was saying.

That’s the stuff that gets him. He doesn’t know what to do with the shit he feels when he thinks about it.

So he tries to redirect, to make himself see the good in it. Maybe it means he isn’t such a lost cause. Maybe there’s someone out there for him after all. Another Sarah Linden. A less complicated version.

But he likes complicated.

*** * * * ***

Distraction comes in the form of a new vice assignment, and suddenly he has no more time to act like a little bitch because Linden trampled on his heart. It’s long days, longer nights, and all he can manage to do when he gets home is stuff his face with whatever he has lying around and collapse into bed. Liz comes by one Saturday with Davy, just to make sure he’s still alive.

“Just been working a lot,” he tells her, trying to muster the energy to pull himself out of bed. Davy sits beside him and stares at him curiously while Liz unloads a bag of food into his fridge. “And, yo, you didn’t have to do that,” he adds, half-annoyed at her for mothering him, half-grateful.

She peeks around the corner and gives him a look. “Yeah, well, you can’t live on bread and tuna.”

“Why the fuck not? Sorry,” he adds automatically, glancing at Davy. He hauls himself out of bed and wanders out of his bedroom, Davy trailing at his heels. He means to go help Liz, but instead he just ends up collapsing on a stool at his kitchen bar and rubbing his face, trying to wake up.

“You need a woman in your life,” Liz teases him, her head in the fridge. “Someone other than me. Someone to make sure you consume at least one vegetable in a month. You’re gonna get scurvy.”

“I eat veggies,” he mumbles, feeling the faint, familiar prickle of gloom creeping up on him at the thought of his few failed relationships. Liz is always busting his balls about being single. Like he hasn't tried. The fact is, he’s hopeless with women. He doesn't know what they need, he hangs on too tight, tries too hard, overreacts to little stuff in a big way. He can never find the right words to say how he really feels, because half the time he can’t even sort through the emotional static in his brain to figure it out himself. And he ain’t exactly a catch, living where he lives, driving a tin can on wheels, spending his days rubbing elbows with the dregs of society just to bust up a few hand-to-hands.

Davy’s up on the stool beside him now, kicking his feet proudly and looking around like he expects something cool to happen now that he’s up there. Stephen glances back at Liz, finding her watching him. “You dated, right?” he blurts out of nowhere, the question bubbling up his throat before he can stop it. He coughs, fidgets, ruffles Davy’s hair in a lame attempt to backpedal.

“Huh?” she asks, her eyebrows pulling together. “What’re you talking about?”

He waves his hand, willing her to leave it alone, but she’s picked up on his discomfort like a bloodhound on the scent.

“Stephen,” she says, her voice loaded with curiosity. “What’s up?”

“Nothin’,” he mutters. “Nevermind.”

Liz closes the fridge slowly, still holding a package of cheese. “Yeah, sure. Come on.”

He sighs. “I just meant, when Davy was little, after Mark —” he waves his hand in the air again, a stand-in so he doesn’t have to say _after Mark killed himself_ — “uh, you went on dates before you met Nathan. When Davy was little. Right?”

Liz blinks, looking at him with her head slightly tilted. “Well, yeah. You babysat for me a bunch of times. Do you not remember all that?”

“Okay, yeah, I know, but, like … you made it work, right? Having a kid and working and dating and sh — stuff?”

Understanding dawns in her eyes. “Did you meet someone?” she asks, sounding excited. “Single mom?”

Stephen shrugs, picking at a speck of old, congealed food on the counter. “Don’t matter,” he says. “Not gonna work out.”

Liz keeps staring at him from across the kitchen. “Well,” she starts — and then shrugs, looking down at the package of cheese in her hand. Stephen cracks a smile, remembering the few times she’d tried to talk to him about girls when they were kids. She was always awkward as hell. Like the time she’d barged into his room, eyes flashing because someone had told her he was fucking around with Krissy Winkler, and she’d stared at a spot just beside his head and asked him stiffly if he had any questions about sex. He was too mortified and too proud to tell her that all he’d gotten from Krissy Winkler was a disinterested, aggressive handjob behind the school’s shop class garage. It was a miracle he even came, but pretty much anything was making him come back then. He’d even thanked her after, like she’d done him some kind of favor instead of almost yanking his dick off.

“She probably just needs some time,” Liz is saying now, talking to the package of cheese. “More time. Her kid’s always gonna be number one, you know? It’s hard, balancing that and … other stuff. It’s hard for other people to understand.”

Stephen takes that in, glancing up at Liz. She gives him a half-smile. “See how it goes,” she suggests, yanking the fridge open to put the cheese back.

“Yeah,” he says. “We’ll see.”

It’s a generous assessment of the situation. A delusional assessment. There’s not going to be any seeing how it goes. It’s gone.

*** * * * ***

Time ticks on, and he still thinks about her. Not as much anymore, now that a few months have gone by. But every now and then, she creeps into his mind when he’s stopped in traffic or waiting in line at the grocery store or sucking down his last smoke of the day. That twisty little smile of hers, mostly. Her laugh.

One November day, he’s holed up in an alley doorway, avoiding the sheets of rain pouring from the sky. He’s watching a scene develop in the skid row hotel across the street. First one cruiser, then another, then the ambulance. Some tweaker probably punched out early. There’s some bad shit going around.

Then the coroner’s van rolls up, trailed by an unmarked car, and he stands up straighter. The car’s interior light flickers on as the driver cracks the door open, and just before she flips her hood up, he catches the unmistakable flash of red hair.

The rain hits him hard as he steps out of his hidey hole and stands in the middle of the alley, just staring, a wave of excitement rolling through him from head to toe.

She slams her door and makes her way through crowd of onlookers, coming into view again when she steps up onto the sidewalk. She stops to talk to a uniformed officer outside the hotel, her face turned up into the rain. When she turns to go inside, she glances over his way.

Even from across the street, she sees him right away. Her expression doesn’t change at all while she stands there and stares at him, and so eventually he just throws her a little nod and a quick grin — nothing more, nothing that would blow his cover. Her mouth turns up just a little, so slight he couldn’t even really call it a smile, but it might as well have been a blowjob for how it makes him feel, like fireworks are going off in his chest.

And then she turns and heads inside. He waits for an hour, itching to see her face again, but she doesn’t come back out.

When he clocks out that night, he’s still flying high on his Linden sighting, newfound energy coursing through his body like electricity. He’s gonna corner Charlie and get her digits. He’s gonna call her. He should have grown a pair and done it a long time ago, but now he has the perfect excuse.

At home, he stands in the shower forever, trying to warm up after spending so much time in the rain. And for the first time in a long time, he lets his mind wander back to their night together. He brings himself off in record time, surprising himself even. And then he feels vaguely paranoid about it, like she’ll know, somehow.

So he almost pisses himself when he hears three sharp raps on his front door just as he’s stepping out of the shower. He stares at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, willing himself to move. No one ever knocks on his door. Not even Jehovah’s Witnesses brave this part of town.

“No fucking way,” he whispers to his reflection. Can’t be. There’s just no way.

But in case it is, he wraps his towel down lower than normal on his hips and makes sure his abs are flexed as fuck when he swings the door open.

She’s got her hood up again, the ends of her hair hanging out of it, soaked through and dripping onto her jacket. He knows his face isn't giving anything away, but she can probably see how hard his heart is jackhammering in his chest.

She reaches up to push her hood back, and her eyes get round as she scans him from head to toe, efficiently, like she’s only got a few seconds to decide whether this is a mistake or not.

When her eyes make it back up to his, she smiles.

“Hi,” she says. Her grin is almost shy. He can hardly believe _that_.

“What’s this?” he asks, fumbling for something funny to say, a smartass remark to cover for the way his insides are twisting and jumping. “This some kinda well check? A knock and announce?”

It’s not really that funny, and it comes out a shade this side of mean when he was aiming for teasing, and he sees the way her face shifts into uncertainty — and he wants to kick himself.

“Uh,” he tries again quickly, leaning against the doorframe to try to force his body to relax. “I mean, I coulda had a girl in here, you know.”

It’s not much better, but he’s so anxious he’s almost sweating.

Her eyebrow quirks. “Do you?”

He pretends like he’s stalling — then shrugs and shakes his head. “Nah. Not tonight. I mean, like every other night it's like Grand Central Station for honeys, you know, but ... no. Just me."

She laughs a bit through her nose, a quick little giggle, and his whole body relaxes, all the muscles unclenching at once.

“Sounds lonely,” she says. She looks down at the floor for a second before she stares up at him again. “Want company?”

Despite his antics in the shower, his dick perks up. His heart flaps like an excited bird, his body temperature ratcheting up by about a hundred degrees.

"Get in here," he says tightly, reaching for her at the same time as she steps towards him.

She tastes like coffee and spearmint gum, and her lips are even softer than he remembers. He has her up against the closed door, pausing only to let her get rid of her clothes, piece by piece. Jacket on the floor, boots kicked somewhere into his kitchen, service weapon inside its holster dropping like a brick on top of the jacket.

He’s trying to keep it together, but his higher brain is already shutting down, and all he can think is _Linden,_ and _Linden’s mouth,_ and _Linden’s tits,_ and _Linden’s hair,_ and _Linden’s ass,_ and _this is really fucking happening._

He surfaces for air, his fingers prodding her sweater. It’s the thickest wool he’s ever felt. “You goin’ fishing, Linden?”

She grabs it by the bottom hem and rips it over her head. The movement knocks her ponytail to the side, bunched up over one shoulder. “Better?” she smirks.

She’s standing there in a bra and her jeans, her cheeks already flushed, eyes glassy, breathing hard, and he sees it again. That look in her eyes. The wish. It cracks his chest open like a walnut. So he goes and does something fucking dumb, and he tells her something real. He says, "I missed you."  

He wants to take it back immediately, the way it makes her freeze in his arms.

"Oh," she says finally, her fingers caught in the towel at his waist. She looks down for a long time, for so long that he starts thinking it’d be better if she didn’t look back up.

"This is all this is,” she says to his chest, and then she looks back up at him, her blue eyes locking onto his like she’s daring him to challenge her. “I mean, it can't be anything else. Okay?"

What's he supposed to say? Yes it can, and you know it? Don't you feel this shit in your chest too when you're with me? Don't you know it ain't never this easy?

"That's cool,” he lies, and he turns them so he’s backing her towards the bedroom. She lets him guide her, her smile growing as he keeps rambling. “Don't want you gettin’ all attached and shit. Makin’ me cook you dinner. Buy you flowers. Remember your birthday. Blah blah blah.”

“I hate flowers, so don’t worry about it,” she says, laughing as he grabs her by the thighs and hoists her up so they can move faster, her legs wrapping around his waist.

“Didn’t figure you for a flower kinda girl,” he says into her mouth, and then she’s kissing him so deep he can’t think of anything more to say.

His chest is swelling with something wild and probably misguided and stupid, hope unfolding where it has no business growing. Fuck, this is gonna hurt when it flames out and dies. But right now it's worth the chance to imagine he's wrong. He can pretend this might have legs, that maybe she'll feel like he does someday. He’s okay with maybe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> GOSH I'M TIRED! But, this was super fun! And I can't thank you all enough for the lovely comments and feedback. 
> 
> After this behemoth, I'll be taking a bit of a breather, but I'm sure I'll be back. Feel free to drop me a line in the meantime - gigi.gstar@gmail.com.
> 
> xoxo


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